Vagabond journeys; the human comedy at home and abroad

V AG A BOND

PERC1VAL POLLARD

VAGABOND JOURNEYS

THE HUMAN COMEDY
AT HOME AND ABROAD

VAGABOND JOURNEYS

THE HUMAN COMEDY
AT HOME AND ABROAD

BY

PERCIVAL POLLARD

Author of

"Their Day in Court," published by this house

"Masks and Minstrels of New Germany,"

and other books

NEW YORK

THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY
1911

Copyright, 1911, by
THE N1ALE PUBLISHING COMPANY

THIS BOOK

is
DEDICATED

TO

THE ONE WHO GOES WITH ME
C. T. P.

254456

CONTENTS

PAGE

Preface, 9

CHAPTER ONE

Humor and Humanity at Sea, 13

CHAPTER Two

Egypt Ruined For a Tourist Holiday, .... 40

CHAPTER THREE

Vandalism In Modern Florence, 51

CHAPTER FOUR: MUNICH

I Modernity, Paint and Carnival, .... 59

II Illustrations and Posters, 77

III Art and The Open -Air Theatre, .... 83

CHAPTER FIVE

A Typical Cure Resort, 101

CHAPTER Six: PARIS

I Her First Invitation, in

II Paris As It Passes, 134

III In Cooking Still Supreme, 143

CHAPTER SEVEN: BERLIN

I Newest of Great Cities, 157

II The Pursuit of Culture, 164

III Art Appetite Compared With Boston, . . 1/4

IV Night Life, 183

CHAPTER EIGHT: LONDON

I Bond Street, 203

II Seen From a Penny Chair, 223

III A Prizefight by Whitechapel Rules, ... 237

PREFACE

Distinction no longer adheres either to the art of
travel or that of letters. The common level for both
sinks year by year. Especially where the two meet,
in what is loosely called a book of travel, have the
cheapness of journeys and the vulgarity of writing
conspired to increasingly mediocre results. The ex-
istence of an intelligent minority undesirous of infor-
mation, of description, careless of guidance, and
impatient of dogma, comes more and more to be
forgotten. It is to such an intelligent minority that
this book is offered.

These pages do not lead to Westminster Abbey,
nor to the Louvre; they profess no rivalry to the
guide-books. The reader need not be afraid that
either facts or dogmatic infliction of opinion will be
forced upon him. Here are simply the impressions
of one individual, a few random excursions with a
whimsical temper.

We live, today, so much in a welter of facts and
figures that each of us is in danger of losing the
qualities of fancy and philosophy. We become al-
most unable to form our own peculiar judgments,
assert our prejudices, think for ourselves. Yet I
venture to declare that in personal expression —
whether about art or about travel — lie not only such
immediate savor, but such elixir of youth as never
adhere to dogmatic decrees or in echoing the opinion
of the majority. To an individual no such thing as

io VAGABOND JOURNEYS

a cut-and-dried truth exists. The opinions of Ruskin,
of Carlyle, do not affect us today as definite truths,
but as expressions of personal whim, kept sweet in
the salt of style.

The reader has, it is hoped, the courage of his
own opinions, his own prejudices. If those do not
march with the prejudices and opinions in this book,
let him at least be sure that these are equally honest.

Never too often can we fight the misconception
that journeys have arrival as object. The proper
traveler knows that journeys' ends are — the journeys
themselves. For the fine old leisurely lust for wan-
dering, the German Wanderlust, too many have sub-
stituted racing by the clock and the calendar. To
say where you are going, where you have been; to
count the miles, the places and the days; the mind of
the average "traveler" of our time knows no more
than that. Between racing across continents while
devouring guide-books, and solemnly and leisurely
digesting the past, present and future of each af)ot
visited, is there no middle plan fit for profitable
philosophy? If my book scarcely ever tells you how
to get anywhither at all, if it offers no help to fledg-
ling migrants, are there not some of you whose
sophistication finds solace in that very omission?

To the artist in travel, the artist in life, traveling
mankind itself remains the paramount study. The
commerce of men and women, one with another; the
comedy that each world-wanderer takes with him as
his luggage ; these are the unfailing interests to those
who go abroad in the world with open eyes. Spots
on the map may stale; men and women never. With
the writer, ever since as a child he was hurried across

PREFACE 1 1

the war-girt Franco-Prussian frontier, travel has
been a life-long habit, yet the fascination in its op-
portunities for observing the human comedy never
stales. To come upon a new town, throw guide-
books into limbo, to walk about the streets, to watch,
to talk with the people — the proper traveler gains
much from such leisurely, individual contemplation.

For feelings our time tries to substitute facts. I
would remind each of my readers that the facts are
amply taken care of, and that what is needed is a
Sentimental Education in travel. Material aids to
travel multiply daily; let us beware of leaving our
feelings at home. Emotions, more than motors, give
virtue to our journeys. These are no sentimental
journeys of mine, in this book, but at least they are
not patterned upon guide-books. If I cannot aspire
to the noble company of Sterne, Stevenson, Octave
Mirbeau, and Otto Julius Bierbaum, I still would give
the reader an invitation such as, whether expressed or
not, they also gave.

I would ask the reader to explore — myself.

October, 1911.

CHAPTER ONE

HUMOR AND HUMANITY AT SEA

NO greater cure is left to-day in our central
civilization than a sea voyage. There is
the one refuge still easy for us all. Some
escape, in this way, bodily and spiritual
ills; some escape boredom. Some seek leisure,
others rest, others variety. Fashionables and snobs,
plutocrats and populace, all go down to the sea in
ships as easily today as once their forefathers went
out on Shank's mare. Some take as luggage one
thing, some another; some their dreams and desires;
some go philandering; some are on philosophy bent.
Ample indeed are the chances for philosophy.
Such voyage gives much to think upon the mutations
of fashion and of sea travel, and, above all, upon
the men and women who indulge therein. On any
voyage giving you a fortnight or more at sea, to
avoid philosophy about our fellows is almost impos-
sible. To many of us, in fact, it is the chief charm;
others come to it grudgingly, as to a last resort.
From the old northern crossing of the Atlantic, it is
true, charm, for all but the most determined observer
and philosopher, is long since flown; that is as hack-
neyed a detail to the sophisticated as a train trip from
New York to Chicago, from Paris to Vienna. Inno-
cents abroad no longer loom noticeably; the general
average has done the thing innumerable times before,

13

H VAGABOND JOURNEYS

and will do it still more times; there are hardly more
chances for social amenities than for philosophy. To
say to another nowadays on an Atlantic Limited Ex-
press: "Didn't I cross with you on the Ruritania
last year?" is only to court the weary answer, "What
month? I crossed three times." Yet, even there,
the fascination of the types aboard our liners seldom
ceases, and if one's interest in humanity remains alive,
romance and humor may come even on those regular,
mail-carrying rushes from port to port.

Nothing less than a fortnight serves for leisurely
philosophy. One of the pleasantest of such less hur-
ried crossings is the one that points toward the sea
which lies midway between Europe and Africa. A
sonorous, polysyllabic title it has, recalling dreadful
spelling lessons of our youth; yet what does it mean
save simply this: the Midway Sea? Let us call it
that. A large and easy-going vessel; dreams of sun-
shine held out by Madeira, the Azores, Gibraltar,
Africa, the Rivieras, Sicily and Italy; few of the
thousands who have gone that way but keep, in haze
of memory, some pleasant pictures of it.

There are, as you know, any number of lines to
choose from. This is no place for pointing out
advantages or the reverse; these things must be
found out in person. Every taste is catered to. If
you like kindergartens and brass bands in profusion
and without ceasing, there are lines which will supply
the want. If you like unlimited wine with your
meals, and can get along without the English lan-
guage, there are lines which will give you that. If
you prefer walking in an air of fashionable aloof-
ness, under a skipper who rarely condescends to say

AT SEA 15

good day to you, you, again, can also be supplied.
But — unless you care to address me privately, under
secret seal, and with inclosure of a fee large enough
to deaden me to all results — you will never discover,
until you actually make the voyage, which is really
the line you ought to have taken. Each of us has
tastes and desires other than our neighbors. These
liners supply all such tastes ; it is for you to find the
right one.

SOME of us, as I said, come to philosophy with
smiles, some come as a last resort. The cynic view,
for instance, is that no man has yet discovered how
the non-gregarious human being may, on shipboard,
escape his fellow-creatures. If you would keep your
health and enjoy the real flavor of the voyage you
cannot, in the rumored habit of the conspicuous
millionaire, seclude yourself utterly in your cabin.
To breathe over and over again nothing but the air
of one of those throbbing cells would be but slightly
conducive to sanity, to health or to temper.

It is not possible, as in the London club of prop-
erly conservative and insular flavor, to consider the
ship a place in which you should avoid your fellow-
man. To hide behind a newspaper and keep your
hat on becomes, in the long run, a trifle ridiculous,
especially when it is obvious that it is the newspaper
of yesterday a week ago. It may be objected that
such cynic curmudgeons as find fault with the people
whom an Atlantic Liner thrust upon them do not
have to go to sea at all. Let them, say you, stay
at home, and rail at the landscape; let them pout
over nature, or Fontainebleau, or Barbizon, or

1 6 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Lyme, and declare to the assembled winds that only
man is vile. Let them confine to their own gloomy
chambers their constant repetition of the old French-
man's saying that the more he saw of men the better
he liked dogs. Let these non-conformists, in short,
stay at home. . . . But, alas, if they did not
travel about the world a little, the cynics and the
non-conformists might cease deserving their titles;
it is only as they carry out into the larger horizons
their prejudices and objections that they succeed in
getting the world at large to confirm their pessimism.
Each man carries with him his own world; the op-
timist finds everywhere some confirmation of his
dream ; the pessimist some proof of his fears. Argu-
ment, written or spoken, never has affected and
never will affect persons of individual intelligence;
we all remain, when debate and dispute are done,
pretty much as we were before.

Since, then, there will always be those who find
fault with things as they are, it may be entertaining
once again to consider the more or less amusing
ways in which an average Atlantic liner's company
of to-day contrives to start cynic observation.

Whatever be the season when we read this page,
let us imagine ourselves, for a moment, once again
at that season when the flood of Eastward travel is
at its crest. Once aboard the lugger are not only all
the world and his wife, but most of the children.
The schools release their young. The collegian,
unripe still in his own proper element, goes seeking
others across the sea. Above all, the American
Schoolmaster is abroad. Male and female these
pour locustwise upon patient Europe, contributing to

AT SEA 17

the continuing cynicism of our most unsocial travel-
ers. One of these cynics remarked, only the other
day, that a perusal of Who's Who had convinced
him that our continent was entirely populated by
authors and educators. Undoubtedly if it were not
for our ''schoolmasters abroad," it might not be so
easy for the itinerant curmudgeon to retain the com-
placent scorn in which he surveys mankind.

YEARS ago, before we began to achieve a definite
system of government tutelage and examination for
that service, it was the American consul who con-
tributed to the average Atlantic liner proof of the
assertion that the United States has a population of
eighty million odd — mostly fools. If on board ship,
in those earlier days, there was one specially blatant
idiot, one peculiarly pompous and noisy ass, it was
sure to turn out that, as consul or consular agent, he
was about to represent the United States in some
unhappy European town. Many an optimist has
been converted by these old-time consular emigrants;
many a patriot has had his confidence shaken by
them. Plucked from some cosmopolitan center like
Muscatine, or Battle Creek, these victors in a politi-
cal spoils system were cast blithely upon an aston-
ished Europe. Remembering how they impressed
those who suffered their presence on the Atlantic,
one has nothing but the grimmest notions of how,
on their European posts, they must have upheld the
Stars and Stripes. At the ship's concert, in the
course of the inevitable speeches, if one essentially
bombastic bit of nonsense got itself unloaded upon
the patient populace assembled — assembled for rea-

1 8 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

sons with which being unwilling to swim the rest of
the way had much to do — that was sure to have
emanated from the representative of our country.
If in the smoking-room one man more than another
aired the things that were not so, it was our consular
friend. Ah, well, those days are gone ; all that was
under the Consulship of — our predecessors; we
order those things better now. They tell us in
Washington that the examinations are becoming as
rigorous and exacting as those demanded by any
other government; they say the standard of intelli-
gence and ability in our consular representatives is
now so high that the ordinary exemplar of the old
regime would no longer be able to enter the fold.
Well, so much the better, and it was high time. We
had too long been, in this respect, a laughing stock
for the others, a regret to ourselves.

The pestiferous position so long held by that now
extinct genus is to-day proudly upheld by the travel-
ing teacher. Lovely, no doubt, in their lives; good
fathers, and mothers, and brothers, and sisters; yes,
yes; we make no manner of doubt of that; and yet,
and yet. . . . What was it the brutal old bear
said when they reminded him that a certain calami-
tous minister led such a beautiful home life? "What
do I care," he growled, "that the man's good to his
wife, if he lets England go to the devil?" Ay; and
even so ; these be, let us never imagine otherwise, the
most admirable specimens of domestic virtue; but —
as exponents of our schoolmastership they are bitter
pills for us others to swallow. If one has been upon
the Atlantic ferry often enough to be considered
something of a commuter, one will have encountered

AT SEA 19

every variety of the schoolmaster type, from the
teacher of a district or normal school in the middle
or far West to the principal of some important
institution or the member of this or that Board, or
this or that lecture course.

Invariably there recurs a similar routine of experi-
ence. Our friend, the professor, approaches the
voyage with all the pomp and circumstance that he
is sure his position entitles him to. Is there a place
in the dining-saloon more choice than another? He
files his claim for it, waving close to the purser's
nose his scholarly credentials and his whiskers.
. . . Let it be remarked that if the London novel-
ist, Frank Richardson, would extend to our Ameri-
can side his curious investigations in whiskered
humanity, he would find wonderful material. . . .
In every way he begins his ship life upon a large
scale. If he figures you as being in the least able to
lisp the intellectual alphabet, he may condescend to
you; but not otherwise. He is an adept at the pump.
He asks you, succinctly, your intentions, not only on
this particular voyage, but in life as a whole. He is
not infrequently something of an amateur hypnotist;
that, at least, would be a charitable interpretation.
He fixes all the women with his whiskered eyes: he
stands before them, as who should say: "Were you
wishful to address my Majesty?" If he learns that
you live in Timbuctoo, he will ask you if you know
the particular potentate there, who is his very dear
friend. If you have been in Oulang-Ylang, he as-
sures you that our ambassador there is his old college
chum. To all of which, if you are polite, you make
but slight reply, and content yourself with wonder-

20 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

ing. For, as the voyage waxes and wanes, the empti-
ness behind the whiskers is daily more clearly discov-
ered. The man is no longer on a rostrum; he no
longer has before him a crew of timid infants, inca-
pable of answering or argument; he is in a section of
Cosmopolis, and he grows daily smaller in that con-
tact. Pompous statements of the things that are not
do not now serve his purpose; here or there, in
smoking-room or at table, he is sure, sooner or later,
to meet a person of real information; before the end
of the trip he is despoiled of all the rumor of intelli-
gence that he brought on board with him. For that
is eternally the revelation in these cases of the school-
master abroad; their so-called learning does not
stand the test of human and experienced contact.
They are teachers who have not in themselves the
stuff for teaching. They are loaded with sham in-
formation, bulging with bombastic superficialities.
From a platform they doubtless impose ; they cannot
impose upon any aggregation of adult travelers who
know the world they live in.

This is not to imply that all our teaching is done
by such as these. It is simply the experience of
somewhat cynic observation. Doubtless, as in every
other human circumstance, it is, aboard ship, only
the counterfeits who blazon themselves. Certainly
the fact remains that the conspicuous types of travel-
ing teachers leaving our shores for the improvement
of Europe and their own minds, are persons who
enable us easily to solve the puzzle of why so many
of our American children, massively crammed with
Isms and Ologies, remain painfully ignorant of the
rudiments of good English.

AT SEA 21

If by any chance one has derived from fiction, or
any other optimistic rainbow, the notion that these
teachers of men must be themselves men of pro-
found thought, of originality, well — all you have to
do is to listen to our friend, the professor. Listen,
just listen, and you will hear the novel twist of
phrase, the individual tone of thought, distilled from
beyond his whiskers. Thus, on the second day or
so: "Well, we are making progress." On the third
or fourth day it is: "Still getting on." To all he
hands out these noble soporific speeches, until you
wish that Martin Tupper were not dead, and, listen-
ing, might kill this other man from sheer envy. You
realize, if never before, that to many people speech
is given to prove the absence of thought.

Do not think, however, that it is possible to dis-
courage our friend, the professor. You may resent
his constant application of the pump, and when he
asks you if you know the great Soandso, retort that
you know Nobody; when he enlarges upon his value
as an item in the great work of Education, you may
retort that you are with George Moore and consider
education a curse; nothing you can say, no rudeness
you may pretend, or pose you may adopt, will touch
the man behind the whiskers; he is safe in his com-
placency and the adulation of the women who adore
him. For that is a strange detail; these whiskered
professors always have about them a train of female
satellites. From near or far they worship. Whether
it be the hypnotic eye, the massive dome, represent-
ing but not exposing thought, or the egregious whis-
kers, or the pompously orated assertion that it is
"another fine day we are having" — who can tell?

22 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

but the fact remains that many ladies of quite certain
age do hang upon his words, and would doubtless be
glad to do the same upon his whiskers. So, after all,
though the rest of the ship's company may, by the
last day, have committed the great crime of finding
him out, some of the dowager duchesses still remain
the professor's devout adherents. So we leave him,
his vanity momentarily recovering from the ship's
laughter, preparing to unloose upon poor Europe
the wind of his rhetoric and the flutter of his whis-
kers. Europe sees these professors in its galleries,
and proceeding like hirsute comets over all the
heavens that Baedeker has starred; it sees them and
it does not whimper; Europe is a patient land. Yet,
in its sleeve, no doubt, Europe has her laughter; she
only needs to see these professorial types for some
few weeks each year; she knows we in America must
suffer them for months; we and our children. And
so that wise old mother, Europe, smiles her smile.

OFTEN as it may have been pointed out, it remains
unanswerably true that there is no place in all the
world where human characteristics so come to light
and so tend to the irritation of the others, as aboard
ship at sea. Under almost any other circumstances
you can, be you so inclined, avoid your fellows. We
know that it is possible to be exceedingly alone in a
crowd. You may walk Broadway or the Avenue,
Bond street or Piccadilly, as introspectively absorbed
as if you were in your own study, your own office, or
on a mountain top. Even in a huge summer hotel,
typical of human hives, you can escape this way or
that; you can take a walk; you can shut yourself in

AT SEA 23

your room; you can take a swim or a sail. Nothing
of all this is possible aboard ship. For the period
of your voyage you are hopelessly cooped up with
this company. If the company is not to your liking,
you are in sad case. You cannot stick in your cabin,
if you are but common mortal, to whom palatial
suites and magnificent spaces are denied; the moment
you go about the deck you are at the mercy of your
companions. If you make intimacies, they are likely
to reach conclusions much more quickly than on land;
and if you discover aversions they will be more keen
and bitter than elsewhere in the world. The ship
tends to an exaggeration of every quality that is in
us. Our virtues and our pettiness are discovered
more sharply and more quickly than elsewhere.
Boredom and the eternal, inescapable round of the
same faces, stir to unimagined venom the most
mildly mannered of us who go down to the sea in
ships. Always these same people at table, always
the same insensate stereotyped phrases every morn-
ing and noon and night; what a frightful, tedious
round, says the cynic. He finds relief, if at all, only
in the constant, silent, secret study of the types be-
fore him. The others are all bent upon the conquest
of more knowledge, more culture, on those Euro-
pean shores; he is content with studying his traveling
fellow-man.

No matter how grim may be one's cynicism, one
can surely never watch, the first day out, that strug-
gle for dining places, without some stir of pity for
the particular steward who has the arrangement in
hand. The traveling theosophists, the Fletcherites
and the Christian Scientists surround him as by a

24 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

hedge; each wants something that is quite impossible,
and he has to pretend that all who clamor will get
absolutely the most desirable places in the saloon.
The amalgamated society of dowager duchesses as-
sures him that they must have a table for twelve
together in this corner; the professor and his satel-
lites must face north; the fashionable colony must be
secluded in this corner here, and the jovial youths
just out of college must be put together over there.
This woman says she couldn't think of sitting there,
and that one vows she will never be able to eat a
single meal if she does not instantly get a place which
has long ago been allotted to another.

And always there is the voice which rises sharply
above the clamor: "I never was on a boat yet that I
didn't sit at the Captain's table." You gaze in awe
at the speaker, and behold a frowzy duchess — the
term is a phrase with me, as the word "ladies" is in
the opera by Lehar — and you instantly feel a surge
of sympathy for the noble army of Atlantic skippers.
What weather they survive, and, aye, what women !
On one ship, I recall, great scandal was caused
toward the end of the trip, by the rumor of a certain
remark from the captain. The poor man had no
doubt been badgered beyond his endurance; he was,
at best, not a convivial soul; at any rate, it was re-
ported that he would sooner fry in Hades than be
married to an American woman. Poor man; he had,
doubtless, that very day, been held up, for pumping
purposes, by some peculiarly leech-like pest. Never,
until you become an Atlantic commuter, will you
realize the depths of imbecility to which apparently
sensible people can fall in the way of asking ques-

AT SEA 25

tions at sea. Invariably, too, they choose the captain
as victim.

Imagine the captain, sitting in the place of author-
ity in the dining saloon. Absorbing food, and lend-
ing an unwilling, ruddy ear. Into that ear, pickled
by the Atlantic breezes, wafts the pick of seagoing
conversation.

You are to imagine him being asked these ques-
tions on the eastbound trip :

"Do you think we will have any difficulty getting
rooms?"

"Would it be all right to wear a biscuit colored
chiffon at Ascot?"

"Does this boat belong to the Corn-bine, or has it
got reciprocating screws?"

"Can you arrange to let us see an iceberg?"

"What made the purser look so vexed when I
asked him if my Pom Pom couldn't have chicken
livers every day for lunch?"

"Can you manage not to land on Friday? But I
suppose you're not superstitious, having so much to
do with compasses, and foc'sles and things?"

Or these, westward ho :

"Don't suppose you can tell me of any good wapiti
shooting over there, what?"

"You see a lot of these American political beggars
on these hookers, I suppose, eh? Lloyd-George sort,
most of 'em, ain't they?"

"Man told me he had to be personally present
while his boots were being blacked in New York.
D'you vouch for it? Pulling my leg, wasn't he?"

"Why do Americans drink so much of that Polish
water or whatever it is?"

26 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

"Has anyone ever thought of applying the vacuum
cleaning principle to a fog?"

You are to imagine, I say, the captain's ruddy
countenance, battered by the fury of a hundred tem-
pests, stained by a thousand suns and furrowed by
the salty sprays of countless billows, keeping grimly
polite.

Then, finally, you are to imagine what, once safe
on the bridge, he says to the wild waves.

I leave you imagining. Imagining, too, that you
have finally discovered where the gales, the bliz-
zards and all the other disastrous things that sweep
the seven seas, originate, and why.

I leave you imagining.

It becomes evident as one listens to the inane
questions asked aboard even the most fashionable
liner, by the most sane-seeming people, that there is
something about the awful monotony of life on
board ship which utterly deadens what in most peo-
ple passes for intelligence. An essay might, indeed,
easily be written, based upon such sea-going observa-
tion, proving that only about one person in a thou-
sand knows enough to keep his or her mouth shut
when there is nothing to say. Life at sea tends, in
short, to bring about a condition bordering on idiocy.
That, at any rate, is the conclusion reached by the
cynic philosopher who listens too attentively to the
prevailing conversations. The rare disclosure of
original thought — well, it is so rare that one is
minded to frame it permanently in one's gallery of
Dodos I Have Met. Too few of us can say, step-
ping ashore from one of these sea-going hotels: At

AT SEA 27

least, I met One White Man ! or : There was One
aboard who Spoke the Tongue.

ONE of the newer features of the salt water com-
muters to-day is the Great Novelist correcting his
proofs. Never a ship sails now but what there is an
inkslinger or two on board; the breed is as impos-
sible to escape at sea as on land. We know these
many years past that it is no longer possible to throw
a stone from any tenement window or mountain top
in all America without hitting a novelist; one is safe
from them nowhere. They are threatening to be-
come worse than rabbits in Australia. Now that
plague has reached the sea. They do not, these
novelists, long let concealment, like a worm i' the
bud, feed on their cheek; no, no, they soon sit obvi-
ously behind a fountain pen, correcting proofs that
all men may behold and marvel. The loud whisper
rises among the dowager duchesses and the various
'Ists from Boston and the other parishes in Puri-
tania : Did you know we had a Novelist among us?
There, to-wit, he sits; magnificent amid the frag-
ments of the new novel, serene amid his family, set
high above his fellow-voyagers. The unsophisti-
cated observe his magnificence, the fashionable attire
of his family, his servants, and they aver that litera-
ture must indeed be a most paying thing. They do
not know, alas, that our traveling novelist, as often
as not, has made his money from a soap, or a patent,
or a parent, and is writing novels simply as an exer-
cise in vanity. If you listen long enough to the great
man buried under proof-sheets, you will learn little
more of wisdom than from the professor of the

28 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

whiskers or from the women who ask the skipper
foolish questions; and you will realize that our poor
literature is by now become a mead which any fool
may enter and the gate to which no honest cudgel
guards. Never mind; you cannot fluster the com-
placency of the great Novelist. It is for these mo-
ments that he has started forth upon his travels; to
be whispered of everywhere as the great Man of Let-
ters. Obscure at home, perhaps, but voyaging
among people who take him at his own valuation, he
is sure of just the recognition that he most desires.
Surely, too, he adds to the human interest of the
ship. People like to think they traveled with a
Great Light of literature. Sometimes he is a play-
wright, hurrying a new play to its conclusion while
the ship makes for port. No matter, whatever sort
of slave to pen and ink he is, you are sure to find
him ; no well behaved ship today sails without him.

A valuable suggestion might be made to such nov-
elists as live today, not so much upon beef and vege-
tables, as on adulation. Let them live altogether
upon liners ! Let them float ever from one ship to an-
other. Every week a new audience of persons who,
knowing nothing much of literature themselves, are
willing to take the Great Novelist's estimate of her
or himself. Think, too, of the novelty of the press
paragraphs possible: "Richard Roomers, the well-
known author of 'The Older Crowd/ has given up
his cottage at Sandylands and is a permanent resi-
dent of the S. S. Asthmatic. . . ." Isn't there a
properly romantic ring about that? I commend the
notion, not only to publishers, and to their pet novel-
ists, but also to the steamship companies. From re-

AT SEA 29

cent observation one must think that a regularly em-
ployed Man of Letters would be a profitable addition
to every self-respecting liner. They have grill-
rooms, Turkish baths, gymnasiums, stenographers,
barbers — why not a Ship's Novelist? As a line to
be cried loud in the advertisements, has not this some
value : The S. S. Insomnia carries a Splits Restau-
rant, an elevator and a Popular Novelist.

Even such a detail as this is a sign of the times.
Once we had to listen to the question: Who reads
an American book? Today you can find no liner on
the Atlantic aboard which a patently prosperous nov-
elist is not sitting, correcting his proofs and curbing,
as much as is polite, the adulation of innumerable
dowager duchesses. Years ago one of the points of
interest was to note what were the books that sea-
goers read; to-day the observer can be kept equally
busy noting what sort of books people write at sea.
From the sternly cynic point of view, too, the discov-
ery of the prevalence of novel-writing at sea explains
much that, in the literature we read on land, had
hitherto been matter for wonder. You may have
heard of the woman who always looks as if she had
dressed at an alarm of fire. Much of our current
literature is, I am sure, written at sea.

NOR is the snob to be forgotten. Rich or poor,
he is always with us. Let us, for easy generalization,
employ the masculine gender. Let us be polite,
whether truthful or not; truth might show the snob
as often a she as a he. The snob on land can be
escaped. When he lifts his voice in the parlor car,
or the palm room, or the street, or the box at the

30 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Opera, there is nothing to prevent your getting up
and going away; at the worst it is only a matter of
hours that you must suffer. But at sea ! Ah ! there
he has you at his mercy.

There are many varieties of the seagoing snob.
There are those who never let you forget they have
a motorcar, and that they are "going to do" Italy or
Egypt, or some other innocent land; they seem to
know about their travels very little, save that "we
did 30,000 miles last year, and it only cost us — ,"
and then they mention a sum with which you are
quite sure you could be happy for the rest of your
life.

The subject of money having once been started,
you hear and feel and smell nothing else for a long
time; the scent of the dollar is even stronger than of
smoke in the smoking room or of the salt on deck;
you wonder why these people do not stay at home
if they are going to take their dollar talk with them
wherever they go. At such moments you know per-
fectly why you are going eastward yourself; it is not
because you seek summer; it is not because you need
holiday, or that you have been ill; it is simply that
you are trying to escape the talk of money. Cooped
up there on board the mid-Atlantic liner, with these
people who talk of money, money, money, you won-
der why blind fate has arranged it so that the people
who seem to have the most money are also the people
who make it an offense to the nostrils of others.

Among the recurring events in any season is the
announcement that such and such a boat bound for
such and such a port — one day it is the Insomnia, the
next week it is the Asthmatic, and another time it is

AT SEA 31

the King John — has on board the representatives of
more American wealth than any steamer that ever
left port. This delicate little invitation to the snob,
as well as to the seagoing gambler, occurs as regu-
larly as the change of the moon.

If it is on one of these boats that you travel, from
the standpoint of fashion, you may be said to have
chosen wisely. Here are representatives of the Most
Dollars — beg pardon, the First Families — in Amer-
ica. Here are notables galore. There is sure to be
a Count or two, probably Hungarians or Italians
from embassies at Washington, going back to castles
whose furniture is mostly consonants. An English
peer, perhaps, is in the mob somewhere, and one of
the many American girls who married a title. Mil-
lionaires abound, and the Catholic clergy is always
well represented on these boats. The priests are
going to deliver to the Church its treasures, while
the millionaires are going to try to bribe the Church
into selling its artistic treasures. All the world goes
to Italy, in motors or in monkish cowl, to sit in the
sunshine and brag of how much the sunshine is cost-
ing, or to scurry through the Florentine jewelry
shops so that friends may later be impressed with the
cheapness of the purchases — all the world goes to
Italy.

There are those whose sole hope seems to be to
reach Monte Carlo and all the other places where the
life of conspicuous bounderdom differs not at all from
what it is in any other of its haunts. These mostly
have motors; they vow it is the only way to see the
country; but don't, if you love seriousness, ask them
too closely what they have really seen in those other

32 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

trips of theirs; the answer is always that refrain,
"We made steen thousand miles." Then there are
the people who sit about the deck reading Loti or
Hichens. They are going to Biskra; you know it
even before they tell you so. Instead of motorcars,
some of the Egyptians have a dahabia of their own.
If you have been so bewildered by the varieties of
tall talk on board that you confuse diabetes with the
houseboat on the Nile, the thing for you to do is sim-
ply to keep still. Keep still and listen to others, and
you will learn much on these boats.

A CHAPTER has long itched to be written about
English as spoken in places where our fashionables
and semi-fashionables most congregate. Perhaps it
is the semis who do the mischief; that, for the sake of
the real article of American breeding, is distinctly to
be hoped. For breeding, that is just what is so lack-
ing in the speech you may overhear on board our par-
lor cars, our millionaire steamers in midwinter, and
the like. An Englishman hearing this speech would
wonder what strange mongrel form of talk was this;
a Western American would stand agape. It has
always been a passion with the more restless in any
society to take liberties with speech, but there has
never been such awful stuff spoken as by our most
conspicuous people. They distort vowels, they mis-
place accents that they imagine as English, and they
behave generally in a way that almost makes one
prefer the Western schoolma'am who pronounces
the language as if she had just learned it.

In this strange parentless speech, then, the snob
assails your ears as you proceed into summer seas.

AT SEA 33

He talks of motor cars, and dahabias, and the hotels
of Syracuse and Sorrento; but, if you are wise, you
will not let him disturb you, for — unless you have
rare bad luck in weather — you can always escape out
on to the boat deck and there lie stretched in the sun
as it grows daily more scorching, until at the end of
a dozen days you have a tanned hide so thick that
not even the snob and his snobberies can penetrate it.

Yes, on most of those boats there is always that
glorious boat deck. If you have been ill, and are
seeking simply peace and sunshine, there is no better
thing in all the world to do than lie there and bask.
Let the others come and wonder; never mind; the
thing to do is to bask. "I simply don't see how you
can stand the glare!" says your most intimate steam-
ship acquaintance, but you wave him away and con-
tinue letting the sun do its fine work of killing all the
germs you have. You may have left icicles hanging
from the pier in the North River, but at Gibraltar
you are going to need your Panama, and for that
Panama you need an appropriate tan; so you lie there
basking.

Some of the millionaires leave you when Gibraltar
is touched. Madeira and the Azores were well
enough; the funny little white villages and farms of
the Azores were gaudy like so many toy towns, and
you recall the names of Pico and Ponta Delgada with
a certain relish. But you have no happy memories
of a millionaire or two the less at those places; no,
that only begins at Gibraltar. There you lose the
splendid folk who are to "do" Spain. Spain, you see,
can be "done" nowadays "between steamers," as the
phrase is. Your ticket allows of your leaving your

34 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

steamer at Gibraltar, and staying there, or in Spain,
across the neck of land, and continuing your voyage
on the next eastbound steamer. So if you are a mil-
lionaire with new regions to conquer by motor, or
if your daughter has a fancy to learn Spanish or a
few Spanish fandangoes, off you go at Gibraltar.

In any event, you will probably go off at Gibraltar
for those hours allowed you while the ship takes on
fresh provisions. It is a brief routine, but always
pleasant. Your first time you will doubtless pay the
price of folly and let a robber disguised in the fa-
miliar livery of cabman drive you to the Alameda
Gardens, past some of the fortifications, and even to
Spanishtown ; the entire distance is only a few blocks
and can be easily walked. If you are of the shopping
sex, you will look for spangled veils and Moorish
brocades, and when you return to the ship you will
have grievous moments wondering if you were
cheated or not, or if the peddler who came aboard
the steamer sold his wares more cheaply than the
merchant in Gibraltar. You will see the oranges in
the gardens, and the flowers over the soldiers' graves,
and the officers swaggering and riding, and the mel-
ancholy, sombre-eyed Moors, who even in their guise
as marketmen maintain their dignity, and the views
aloft through quaint alleys as charming as aught in
Genoa itself.

The lessening of numbers begins with Gibraltar
and increases with every stop. In Naples some of
the millionaires have their motor cars waiting;
others are for Palermo ; some for Fiume, having just
heard of the Dalmatian riviera ; others are still wav-
ing dahabias in our awed faces. One by one you will

AT SEA 35

lose sight of them for the time being. Soon it will
be in all the cables that the Popular Novelist is tour-
ing through Touraine, or some other unhappy ghost-
land, in his Odol car, and soon the Professor will be
insufficiently buried in Pompeii, and the dowager
duchesses will be being presented to the Pope. The
usual strangers, who have not been seen through the
whole voyage, arrive from secret holes, and show
themselves stealthily or gorgeously on the last day.
The usual pretended intimacies die and the usual
brave hopes of subsequent meetings flourish. uBe
sure to come and see me when you get back; second
house to the left between New York and Boston!" —
some of the sentences are as absurd as that. Every-
one is so glad to have met everyone else. The candid
friend, with courage to admit that he or she is
heartily glad to get rid of the whole tribe, either does
not exist or cannot find the courage. Once dumped
upon the dock, once in the port, the company scat-
ters; yet some linger a little — linger and wonder.
They see strange couples newly assorted; they watch
the beginnings of this comedy and the end of that,
and they wonder — they mightily wonder.

The snobs who have told you all the way over that
they are going to a "dear little place called Alassio,
where, they say, there are no Americans at all, only
the nicest English people," you will lose these; and
you will also lose the magnates from the Western
town who told you that "that awful creature over
there in the fur coat has been speaking to us just be-
cause he's from Detroit, the same as we are. Of
course, in Detroit we simply wouldn't think of no-
ticing him."

36 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

As FOR the determined slaves of fashion, they take
mostly to an identical trip northward. The routes
vary, to be sure, but they run together at one point
or another. Some go straight up via Capri, Sor-
rento, Rome, and Florence; you see them again in
the Uffizi or in St. Peter's; some go to Venice, and
there are also the bold ones who make for Vienna in
order that they may come home and tell you that they
heard "Count of Luxembourg" or "The Brave Sol-
dier" two years before America even heard of it.
There is great satisfaction in that being beforehand
about the art matters of Europe, and some of our
fashionables begin to realize it; still, for the most
part, the people wise enough to be pioneers of that
sort are rich in other ways than money or fashion.
Some find one another again in Nice, some in Lu-
cerne, and by Easter they all try to reach Paris.
There are, you see, certain social festivals which the
real devotees try to attend. Rome has its social sea-
son, Florence is still for a certain set the first of all
winter cities, as Ouida called it; and the people who
know their way about try to reach Paris before the
summer warmth begins to fill it with the type of
Americans who are halted in front of Cook's atop
of a char-a-banc. A little later comes the opening
of the London season, and the fashionable northing
has been completed.

A great cure-all is this cruise, and yet there are
some who find no comfort even in this cure. In Sor-
rento, one month of March, there was a blithe spirit
in the Vittoria who was perhaps the most typical
instance of the nerve-ridden American who is utterly
incurable. He had a lovely mode of accosting you.

AT SEA 37

uAh," said he, meeting you in the hotel corridor
after dinner, "American, I see! I'm from Minneap-
olis; I'm in the lumber business. What's your busi-
ness?" All in a breath, quick as lightning, and all
with a smile; and only an Englishman could have had
the heart not to meet him as smilingly as possible. In
a few moments he had given you a sketch of his life,
of the state of his nerves, and had passed on.

Weeks later you might be sitting in a cafe in Flor-
ence, reading an English paper. Suddenly a voice
would begin behind you, quickly, and in the same old
formula: "Ah, American, I see; my name's Jones,
and I'm from Minneapolis," and when you turned
around the same face from Sorrento was there, and
only was taken aback for the shortest of moments.
Later you met him in the Haymarket in London.
Later still, safely homebound on a steamer that you
had entered at Southampton, you might be thinking
of the curious meetings of travel, when, the morning
after touching at Queenstown, who should appear but
Jones from Minneapolis! He had just been visiting
Mr. Croker, and his nerves were not much better.
Months still later a motor car in a New England
village nearly runs you down, and you see a flag
bearing this device, "We are from Minneapolis,"
and there sits Jones again. More months go by, and
you pick up the paper and see that Jones, who has
just completed so many thousand miles in a motor-
car, has taken to ballooning. And so on goes Jones,
who is a victim of nerves and cannot stay still, though
he die of his restlessness. For Jones, then, such a
voyage, afloat and ashore, is but one lap in a long
struggle against tedium.

38 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

You scatter, you drop away, you become flying
fragments of what has been seabound company; yet
you may meet again. Those who came for health,
those who escape tedium, those who follow fashion,
and you who bring philosophy, all drop off, all scat-
ter. The people who are to inhabit villas in Rapallo,
or who have friends in Fiesole with whom they are
to spend the spring, they will all gradually drop
away.

You may find them again after the scattering, and
you may find that the villa in Rapallo is a cheap pen-
sion, or that the Fiesole visit has resulted in a fever-
ish chase behind a guide in the Pitti Gallery. Vastly
amusing is it to note these changes, later in the year,
when such flying fragments of humanity from this
or that ship meet; to see how the uninspired idiots
of the sea have regained human intelligence, how the
dowager duchesses who asked insane questions of the
skipper are now badgering all the hotel portiers of
Europe, and how the Popular Novelist has succeeded
in maintaining his personal fame by the simple trick
of constantly changing his audience. In this or that
European watering-place you may discover convales-
cents recovering from the ship's concert — an afflic-
tion far worse than seasickness.

The ship's companies scattered, its members first
gaily adventuring forth upon the patient older conti-
nent, then reassembled for their return, and then
once more flung forth upon their own land, — we may
again observe the cynical commuter of the Atlantic,
shaking himself, as a dog who has been in the water,
and muttering again, as he gradually regains his hold
upon a rational outlook :

AT SEA 39

"From them that go down to the sea in ships, good
Lord, deliver us!"

We others, not yet so cynical, reach philosophy in
the reflection that, when all the pseudo-human crea-
tures aboard the lugger are counted, there still re-
mains a small residue of delightful, genuine, real
human beings whom to recall with pleasure for the
rest of life. Whether you are fashionable or merely
human, snob or philosopher, you will never regret
such journey.

CHAPTER TWO

EGYPT RUINED FOR A TOURIST HOLIDAY

IF the annually increasing horde of Anglo-Saxons
wintering abroad ministers thereby to its own
delight, there are those to whom it is a special
aversion. In the case of that French lieuten-
ant who writes under the name of Pierre Loti that
aversion has been so expressed as to make the most
delightful of reading, especially concerning Egypt.
Loti loves Egypt, and he hates travelers, and out of
that love and that hatred beautiful pages have been
born. It is impossible to write more beautifully of
Egypt than Loti has done. In that wonderful prose
of his, as tremulous as light, as vibrant as distant
music, he has painted the beauties of that land of
roseate skies, blinding sands, blood-colored rocks,
and immortal ruins. Yet for those prose beauties
of his, for the pages on which he has spilled the crys-
tal jewels of his phrases about Egypt as lavishly as,
in other books, he did upon the subjects of Japan and
Constantinople, you are not to look here. Here I
would remark only upon those pages in his "La Mort
de Philae" which express his rage against the Anglo-
Saxon tourist. Never can one sufficiently emphasize
any document which bids "the others" mend their
manners.

For, as philosophy shows, in cases of this sort we
are never, ourselves, the tourists assailed. It is

40

EGYPT RUINED 41

always "the others." We bear with the utmost calm
the chastisement of an entire class in which we im-
agine ourselves to be distinct exceptions. It has been
said that one cannot indict a nation. But Loti has
done his best to indict the whole tourist tribe. Or,
to be precise, he regrets their existence; they, for
him, obscure and spoil the whole Egyptian country.
Upon its charm, its mystery and myth, this tourist
tribe obtrudes — so runs the Loti plaint — its ever-
hideous self.

The tourists represent to Loti the human faces of
modernity. And, as we know from all his books, he
is a sworn foe to modernity. Ruskin fought no more
fiercely against our utilitarian age than does this
Frenchman, supposedly in the employ of Mars, but
really servant of the Muse. English rule in Egypt,
England's treatment of the Nile waters, the building
of the Assouan Dam — all these matters draw Loti's
gentle anger; but most of all it is the tourists, the
tourist agencies. Curiously enough, he never names
American tourists specifically. Yet we cannot fancy
ourselves immune from his disfavor; he has simply
lumped us with the English, the dominant race among
the visitors there.

Night, the night of latter-day Egypt, may be said
to be one dominant note of Loti. Night in Cairo,
night in Thebes and night in Luxor are painted in
colors that for permanence may surpass Boecklin or
Gerome or Stuck. The night of Egypt, and Pierre
Loti's pity, these are the dominant notes. He wrote,
years ago, his "Book of Pity and of Death," and ever
since the note of pity has seemed to me his greatest.
Throughout this book he paints and pities; paints the

42 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

glories of that land of ruins, and pities their being
haunted by the tourist tribe.

He loses no time beginning his diatribes against
modernity as represented by the tourist. He has
painted for us night upon the desert, and the Sphinx,
as only he can do it, when he suddenly shows us the
reverse of the picture. This desert of the Sphinx, he
tells us, is now threatened on every side by modern-
ism, and is becoming a meeting place for the idlers
and the parvenus of the whole world. He goes on:

"It is true that so far nobody has dared to profane
the Sphinx by building in immediate proximity to its
grandeur, the fixed disdain of which may still be
potent. Yet, scarcely half a league away, is the ter-
minus of a road where cabs and tramways gather,
and where motor cars of expensive makes emit their
ducklike quacks; and yonder, behind the Pyramid
of Cheops, looms a vast hotel, swarming with snobs,
and with fashionables feathered as insanely as red-
skins for the scalp dance; with invalids in search of
fresh air; with young English consumptives or old
victims of rheumatism seeking the dry winds."

For a little time we are again in the Egypt of the
Sphinx and the many infinite speculations which that
figure has started without satisfying; then Loti, with
his gentle irony, marks the passing midnight hour by
showing us the groups of tourists separating and dis-
appearing to regain the hotel, where the orchestra
doubtless still rages, or to enter their motor cars to
be whirled to some Cairo club to play bridge, a pas-
time to which to-day, sadly remarks our author, "even
superior minds descend."

Next we are shown the decay of the old Cairo

EGYPT RUINED 43

that was, the real Cairo. Loti is wrapped in solemn
peace before the tomb of Mehemet All, engaged in
reverent reflections, when breaking in there comes
"an uproar of loud Teuton talk." Let it be noted
that M. Loti is impartial; he loathes modernity; he
does not care what national flag is waved. Even his
own French nation does not escape his reproach, as,
in the matter of Egypt's use of absinthe, you shall
frequently see in this book. Let us return to the
Teuton uproar:

". . . The Teuton tongue. And shouts ! And
laughter! . . . how is it possible, so close to
Death? . . . There enters a band of tourists, got
up smartly, or near-smart. A comically inclined
guide is labeling the beauty spots for them, talking
with all his might as if he was the capper for a circus.
And one of the ladies, whose sandals, too large for
her, make her stumble, bursts into a high, foolish
laugh, long drawn out, like the gobbling of a turkey.

uls there not, then, any policeman, any watchman,
in this sacred mosque? And among the devout pros-
trate in prayer, not one to rise indignantly? . . .
Who, after this, can ever talk to us of Egyptian
fanaticism? Rather they are too tolerant. I should
like to see how, in any church in Europe where men
were on their knees in prayer, Mussulman tourists
who — impossible conception! — behaved as badly as
those savages did would be received."

Of the many mosques of Cairo we are given
sketches that seem almost without a flaw. Yet for
Loti there is ever a flaw.

"What," he asks, "do those mosques lack? . . .
It must be that access to them is too easy, that one

44 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

feels one's self too close to the modernized, hotel-
infested regions filled with tourists, and that one fore-
sees at any moment the clamorous intrusion of a band
of Cook's selected, Baedeker in hand. Alas! these
are the mosques of Cairo, of poor invaded and pro-
faned Cairo. . . . On for those of Morocco, so
jealously closed! Those of Persia, or even of Old
Stamboul, where the shroud of Islam wraps you in
silence, and gently falls upon your shoulders the
moment that you cross the threshold!"

Not even the outskirts of Cairo, which tempt Loti
to some of his finest descriptive passages, are clear of
his enemies. In order not to meet any tourists, he
has chosen for his nocturnal visit a night that was
none of the clearest. But —

"As we approached the vast tomb of Sultan Bar-
kouk the assassin we saw issuing from it a gang, a
score or so in file, emerging from the shadow of the
ruined walls — each bumping about on his little don-
key, and each followed by the inevitable donkey
driver incessantly belaboring his beast. They are
on their way back to Cairo, the show being over, and
they exchange, at the tops of their voices, from one
donkey to another, their mostly inept impressions,
in various Western tongues! Behold, even in this
crew there is the traditional belated lady, who lags
quite a distance back; she seems, as well as the moon
enables one to judge, a somewhat ripe flower, but still
has her attractions for the donkeyman, who, with
both hands, supports her on her saddle, from behind,
with a solicitude that is touching. . . . Ah ! these
little Egyptian donkeys, so observing, so philosophic,
so sly, if only they could write their memoirs ! What

EGYPT RUINED 45

many amusing things they have seen in the outskirts
of Cairo at night!"

In another passage M. Loti recurs to the donkey
detail. He had attempted the funereal splendors of
Abydos, of the temple of Osiris raised by Sethos, and
once again he had been routed by the tourists and
their luncheon. At the end of one of his most ran-
corous attacks upon the tourist tribe he apostrophises
one of the donkey burden bearers :

"There was one love of a white donkey that looked
at me, and in a flash we understood each other and
mutual sympathy was born. A Cookess in glasses
sat this donkey; the most awful one of them all, bony
and severe; over her traveling dress, already suffi-
ciently formidable, she had drawn a tennis jersey that
still more accentuated her angles until her person
seemed to breathe the very incarnation of British
respectability. Besides it would have seemed more
fair — so long were her legs, which held no attraction
for the human observer — that it had been she who
carried the donkey.

"He gazed at me sadly, the poor little white chap,
his ears twitching ceaselessly, and his fine eyes, so
all-observing, were unmistakably saying to me :

" She is hideous, isn't she?1

" Good Lord, yes, you poor little burden bearer.
But consider, glued to your back as she is, up there,
you have at least this advantage over me, that you no
longer see her.'

"Yet that reflection of mine, however wise, did not
console him, and his look told me that he would be
prouder to carry, like so many of his fellows, an ordi-
nary bundle of sugar cane."

46 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

In that haunt of Abydos, redolent of ghosts, M.
Loti had been more than usually angered by the in-
vading hordes. He had been roused from his dreams
of tombs, of sanctuaries, of prehistoric peoples, there
in the valley of the Nile, by the noise of people talk-
ing and gabbling in British accents, of glasses clink-
ing, of forks clattering on plates. He realized then
that his temple was desecrated by a tribe of tourists
lunching.

"Poor, poor temple, to what are you fallen ! What
excess of grotesque profanation is this? More than
a score of places laid at table for a convivial crew of
both sexes of those peculiar beings shepherded by
Thomas Cook & Son, Egypt, Limited. Cork helmets
and blue spectacles. Drinking whisky and soda ; eat-
ing with their buckteeth, and throwing away the
greasy paper that held the food. And the women,
oh ! those women, what scarecrows ! . . . And it
is like that every day, during the season, so the black-
robed Bedouin guides tell us. A luncheon 'chez
Osiris' is part of the programme of 'pleasure trips,'
Every noon a new gang arrives, on irresponsible and
unfortunate donkeys; as for the tables and plates,
they are kept stored in the ancient temple !

"Let us fly quickly, and if possible before the sight
has been stabbed upon our memories. . . . But,
alas ! even when we are outside, alone once more upon
the shining sands, we can no longer take anything
seriously; Abydos, the desert, all have ceased to
exist; those female faces haunt us, and their hats,
and their looks behind their sun glasses. . . . The
Cook face was once explained to me in what seems,
off-hand, a reasonable way: 'The United Kingdom,

EGYPT RUINED 47

jealous of the well-earned repute for beauty of its
girls, submitted them to a jury when they reached
maturity. To those who were adjudged too ugly for
purposes of posterity was given a perpetual pass with
Thomas Cook & Son, which thus vowed them to an
endless voyage that precluded their leisure for certain
other trifling details of life.' The explanation fasci-
nated me from the first. But a more careful scrutiny
of these hordes infesting the valley of the Nile leads
me to submit that all those Englishwomen are of a
notoriously canonical age. ... so that I remain
perplexed."

On a further page our author laments the desecra-
tion of the Nile to its present uses. He paints for us
incomparable etchings of the Nile of other days, and
of all that it evokes in sights and sounds. He makes
us feel again that peace which, passing understand-
ing, once dwelt there. And now —

"And now, before the tiniest of little towns — amid
the primitive little boats, that are still numerous,
pointing their timbers like long reeds toward the blue
sky — here are always, as landings for the tourist
steamers, enormous black pontoons disfiguring all
things by their presence and by their shrieking ad-
vertisements : 'Thos. Cook & Son, Egypt, Limited.'
Further, one hears the whistle of the train that mer-
cilessly skirts the river, to traverse thence the Delta
as far as the Soudan, carrying hordes of European
invaders. And, finally, close to the stations are the
inevitable factories, ironically triumphant, dominat-
ing with their smokestacks all those poor, ruinous
objects that still attempt to voice Egypt and its
mystery. . . .

48 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

"Poor, poor Nile, that once reflected on its warm,
glassy waters the sum of earthly magnificence, that
bore so many barks of gods and goddesses in train
behind the golden ship of Ammon, and that knew
only, until the dawn of ages, purity impeccable, in
human form as well as in architectural conceptions I
. . . What a fall ! After that disdainful slumber
of twenty centuries, to bear to-day the floating bar-
racks of Cook's agency, to feed sugar factories, and
to exhaust itself in growing from its fecund mud the
stuff for English cottons ! . . ."

Wherever M. Loti goes he has the same lament.
He visits Luxor, and on Luxor modernized he pens
one of his most plaintive chapters. He finds Luxor
dominated by the stucco monstrosity of a huge hotel,
and the whole district flooded with impossible people,
with tourist boats ; he finds the whole place swarming
with specimens of the whole world's plutocracy,
dressed by the same tailors, hatted by the same hat-
ters; shops and all the other impedimenta of so-called
civilization; and, above all the babel of the tourist,
the same people whom one sees at Nice or on the
Riviera. The noise of dynamos disturbs these an-
cient airs.

At Thebes it is the same. There are chapters on
Thebes at high noon, Thebes at night. We see the
beauties as Loti can so graphically paint them, and
then we are shown the blots upon them; that is the
story of almost every chapter in the book. Even
midnight in Thebes is not safe:

"This moon," he sighs, "will presently bring peo-
ple. A league away, at Luxor, I know well they are

EGYPT RUINED 49

hurriedly rising from their tables, so as not to miss
the celebrated spectacle. For me, then, it is time to
escape, and so I move away, toward the pyramids of
Ptolemy, where dwell the watchmen of the night.
Already they are busy, these Bedouins, opening the
way for some tourists, who have shown permits, and
who carry kodaks and stuff for flashlight pictures
there, in the temples. . . . Further off is the crowd
arriving, carriages, people ahorse, on donkeys, talk-
ing and shouting, in all tongues save Egyptian. . ."

So we could go on, chapter on chapter. We gain
throughout the sharp outline of Loti, poet and mys-
tic, most passionate of pagans, and most devout of
religious men, flying, always flying, before the tour-
ists of our time. He is like Lafcadio Hearn, like
Robert Louis Stevenson, and many others, masters
of the same craft of prose, himself somewhat out of
tune with the time. He is of those who remind us
of other and, so they vow, much finer times. What
these men suffer, in that they are so out of tune with
our drab modern tone, we gain, since they so admir-
ably voice their sufferings in prose.

Loti has many fine passages calling on the Egyp-
tian of to-day to restore the ancient, reverent things
and to oust all these alien influences. There are pas-
sages aimed at the English financial operations by
which Egypt is squeezed like a lemon. But, chiefly,
his note is pity for the Egypt of to-day, for tourist-
ridden Egypt, and pity for the illimitable patience of
the Egyptian fellaheen.

As for his hatred of the tourist, here is the irony

50 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

of things exemplified: his pages on Egypt are so
beautiful in their descriptions, in their evocations of
all that is mysterious and lovely in that land, that all
who read will wish to see Egypt — and thereby swell
the army of the tourists so loathed by M. Loti.

CHAPTER THREE

VANDALISM IN MODERN FLORENCE

IT is not only Luxor that the vandals have tried
to modernize; not alone Loti who has pro-
tested.

It is curious to note how these things move
in waves, though continents and oceans may inter-
vene. The pest of attempting to fill with plaster the
fine ruins of this or that splendid and authentic bit
of architecture or sculpture in this or that corner of
the ancient world ; of disclosing with acids and washes
portions of antique paintings hitherto rich in mys-
tery and the dignifying veils of Time; of interpret-
ing through impertinent and dilettante spectacles the
meanings of nobly cryptic passages in paint, in prose
or stone — this pest has for many years past been run-
ning a devastating blaze across the world of art.
Money, perhaps, has been the root of some of that
evil; there are hardly authentic antiquities enough
for the collecting millionaires, and so the manufac-
ture of antiquities, the falsifying of the genuine, the
forging and the faking have resulted simply to supply
a demand. Of all that forging and doctoring up of
spurious antiquities, Florence has long been the
capital.

Just as it has meant to the world at large the piv-
otal point in the history of the arts of painting and
sculpture, so has Florence harbored within stone's

51

52 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

throws of its great museums and art palaces the
greatest art forgers in the world. This has for years
been an accepted truth in the world of art.

When the antique masterpieces of Florence have
for years past shown the blighting activities of the
itch for restoration, it is little wonder that the can-
vases of a Homer Martin should have been put under
legal scrutiny that caused nothing less than scandal-
ous chatter in every artistic community in America,
or that Rembrandt's "Mill" or this or that other sup-
posed masterpiece has been declared of doubtful
authenticity. Since the fiasco of Herr von Bode and
other omniscient gentlemen, we are somewhat accus-
tomed to doubt. Yet it was something of a shock to
discover that not even the great public galleries of
Florence — safe, we supposed, from the chicane pos-
sible in private places — have been free from the
mania for restoring, for touching up, for dangerously
meddling, in short, with the world's accepted master-
pieces in paint.

THE war of the resident painters and connoisseurs
against the authorities directing the great Florentine
galleries has been long in coming to a head. The
directorate of the Uffizi and Pitti seems, indeed, to
have been as rank a body as any Park Commission or
Water Board convicted of incompetence and corrup-
tion in an American municipality. Not that either
dishonesty or any selfish sort of corruption was di-
rectly charged against those governing bodies. Their
great crime, in the eyes of the opposition, was igno-
rance. They hung the pictures badly; they issued
catalogues that reeked with error, and then, worst of

VANDALISM IN FLORENCE 53

all, they began most abominably to manhandle some
of the most cherished masterpieces in the Florentine
world of paint. Works by Raphael, by Leonardo,
were subjected to restoration, until entire ruffs or
collars, or shoulder capes, were brought into view
in cases where, so the artists and unattached connois-
seurs declared, the antique artist himself had been at
pains to obscure these first crude outlines. Simply
because the restorer, with his chemicals and his erod-
ing processes, discovered the canvas held those
things, he determined to have those things displayed.
The artist was too dead to protest.

Florence is, as most people know, the mecca of the
working art-world to-day. Hardly a painter in any
country who does not come, at one time or another,
to 'Florence. The German, the English and the
American painters come oftenest and stay longest.
The colony of resident artists is not inconsiderable.
You may, in the season, go to one of the great an-
tique galleries every morning and to a studio of a
modern painter every afternoon. William Chase
takes his class of students there every now and again;
great German teachers do the same. As you walk
or drive on the Viale you cannot well help noting the
curious square tower in which the painter Roelshoven
has his dwelling and his workshop. And you may
see, from that same spot, the wondrous house where
lives the greatest antique dealer and greatest fraud in
all Florence. So these opposites are always side by
side. It is a community of living artists as well as
of dead masterpieces. And that community of living
artists and amateurs of art and of antiquity has a

54 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

constant fight against the encroachment of that hid-
eous plague of to-day, the mania for restoration.

Florence itself, as a town, as a cluster of incom-
parable architectural antiquities, has had to suffer
from this plague. Not until after the old market,
with its charming and inimitable gems and nooks and
historic associations, had been torn away to make
way for to-day's hideous open square, with the fright-
ful equestrian statue of the king; not until then did
the artists and the real lovers of Florence realize that
there must be co-operation to defeat the enemy. The
town government must, in those years, have had a
silly dream of making Florence more modern, more
comfortable, more acceptable to the tourist who
wishes to sit outdoors and drink beer. Well, you
can do that to-day on that square; but, if you have
the faintest glimmer in you of the value of tone and
time, you curse as you sit there. Florence must be
crowded and narrow and dark and mysterious and
cosy and old to be herself. That huge open square
in its centre, with its tourists and its tables, its statue
and its senseless galleries on the Strozzi side, that is
as pathetic as a great tragedian who has come down
to be a sandwich man. The artists, it is true, sat
there themselves, on the side nearest the straw mar-
ket; but as they sat they cursed many things. And
among those whom they cursed were always the au-
thorities of the Uffizi and the Pitti and the other
galleries.

IT remained for the printed articles of Signor Ric-
cardo Nobili to arouse the general art-loving public

VANDALISM IN FLORENCE 55

to a realization of the conditions. In a series of ana-
lytical and authoritative papers this critic and artist
proved crime after crime against the authorities.
The gist of the whole indictment was that the admin-
istration of the public galleries was utterly incompe-
tent, lacked expert knowledge and made up for that
only by bureaucratic pompousness. Signer Nobili
himself is the fine figure in this whole warfare, which
waged for months in Florence, and was eventually
taken higher, to the Italian Parliament itself. The
Nobilis are themselves of the great Tuscan families,
yet Riccardo Nobili's achievements are simply those
of a strong individual in art and art analysis. He is
himself painter and sculptor; he could have gone far
in either direction; but he determined upon connois-
seurship of art as his preferred metier. From the
first he began war against the countless impostures
that his home town reeked with. He has that inex-
plicable sixth sense that tells him whether a painting,
a statue, is genuine or false. Only by aid of that
sixth sense can the most profound student achieve
actual results in criticism in connoisseurship. I do
not think either Morelli or Berenson have this sense
so perfectly as Nobili. He is, as aforesaid, himself a
Tuscan ; blood tells him much that not the most metic-
ulous study could ever seize. He is himself accom-
plished in paint and in modeling; he was one of the
men of Julian's in Paris. He knows all the secrets of
the forger; he has devoted his life to this cause. In
a question of: Is this a Leonardo? or, Are those
bronze doors genuine fourteenth century? wise is the
millionaire or the dealer who would trust to that
strange sixth sense that is in Riccardo Nobili.

56 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

It is even possible, in comparatively light reading,
to glimpse this Italian authority's knowledge of the
subject of art, old and new. He published in Eng-
land a few years ago a story called UA Modern An-
tique," in which he made popular use of much of his
learning in this sort. He told the methods whereby
statues and canvases were artificially aged; how the
patine was perfected, and how, in short, the dealers
in antiquities thrived on the gullability of the type of
collector who wanted only famous names. He told,
too, how the modern members of the Florentine aris-
tocracy retrieve their bankrupt fortunes by conspiring
with such fraudulent dealers; how they lend their
names to add a touch of genuineness to the spurious.
Above all, Signor Nobili told the case of a young
sculptor who created a bust which passed for an an-
tique gem and was sold for a fabulous amount as the
result of just such a conspiracy between dealers and
Florentine nobles. Now, it is long notorious in Flor-
ence that, for only one example, the Strozzi palace
has been emptied of its real art treasures more than
once ; yet the sale of specimens labelled genuine owing
to their having been "in the possession of the Strozzi"
still goes merrily on. Again, the episode central in
S. Nobili's book has since that publication been almost
exactly paralleled by the incident of the Leonardo
bust and Dr. Bode.

Florence is poor in newspapers. One need recall
only the Fieramosca and the Nazione. There used
to be a paper for English readers, but it no longer ex-
ists. People who really wish to read the news of the
day are likely to wait until the Corriere della Sera
comes in from Milan or the Tribuna from Rome.

VANDALISM IN FLORENCE 57

Yet if the Nazione had done nothing save print these
propagandist articles of S. Nobili's it would deserve
the thanks of the world's art lovers. For weeks the
critic pounded, in those pages, against the adminis-
tration of the Florentine galleries; he convicted them
of every crime that ignorance and incompetence can
commit. More than once the intimation came to him
that if he would only stop his pounding he could be
made a cavaliere. But cavalieri are as thick in Italy
as Legion of Honor men in France. S. Nobili was
not to be swayed by these insinuations. It happens he
is as much socialist as aristocrat; he consorts with
such men as Edward Carpenter and Hyndman and
Orage in England, the while the Florentine nobility
has to admit him as brother. He Was without the
passion for money or fame; he had the single pas-
sion for art — art as the artists had conceived and de-
signed it. When that design was tampered with, the
analytic critic in him became the destructive critic.

SUCH good fighting cannot ever quite die down,
since the vandals also never die. Only the other day
one noted, in Florence, a new crime. It was in the
Viale dei Colli, where the restorer has been busy at
the old tower of San Miniato, filling in with plaster all
traces of the cannon bullets sent against that tower
in 1 5 2 8 by the artillery of Charles V. during the Flor-
entine siege.

If ours be indeed an age of facts, let them at least
be authentic facts. We have too many pseudo art
lovers who patter half-truth and discuss as history the
things that are not so. There are too many Lilian
Whitings who, as in her "Florence of Landor," point

58 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

out as "near the Villa Landor an old villa with mar-
ble terrace, which dates back to 1658, and where Lo-
renzo the Magnificent died." . . . Now, Lo-
renzo died at Villa di Careggi in 1492 !

If we look upon antique art and history, let us at
least try for the authentic article. Upon antique
Florence, upon Florentine art, I know but one sure
guide, whom I have already named. The Baedekers
and the Brownings and the Romolas may tell you just
what will least disturb your parochial culture. Only
Hewlett and Ouida have caught the tone of the Tus-
can peasant and the Tuscan patrician, and only Ric-
cardo Nobili, not Berenson and not Morelli, has the
secret divining-rod that shall find the well of authentic
Tuscan art.

The Raphaels and the Leonardos are centuries
dead; Homer Martin was but briefly dead; yet his
canvases did not escape the hand of the restorer.
What is the moral for the buyer of pictures? What
said George Moore, in his impertinent youth, of
Henry James, but this : "Right bang in front of the
reader nothing happens."

Will the picture-buyer of the future have to insist
upon sitting in the painter's studio while the picture
grows "right bang in front of him?"

CHAPTER FOUR

MUNICH: HOME OF THE ARTS

I
MODERNITY, PAINT, AND CARNIVAL

IN life, as in art, the essentially modern spirit is
hard to keep under. If Egypt, if Florence, if
even Venice succeed, for a time, in suffusing us
with a romantic, not to say archaic outlook
upon life and its arts, such other-century sentiment
does not long survive the chilly Alpine crossing.
In order properly to emerge as moderns interested
in modernity, the place to make for is Munich. Yes,
Munich is the place wherein to reassert that in us
which had of late been too much submerged beneath
the madness of the Venetian moon and the lyric con-
fusion of the nightingales in Florence. We were tired
of Giotto and all his works ; beneath the gold dome of
St. Mark's all you could catch was rheumatism; be-
tween the Molo and the Lido there was little save
the typhoid germ, and the antiquity merchants in the
Via Maggio were descendants of the Forty Thieves.
We would shake from us the dust of Italy.

To be rid of Italian dust is not, of course, possible
until you have the hottest of hot baths in whatever
cleaner country your train has deposited you. For,
as all old travelers will tell you, however enamored

59

60 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

you may be of antique art and its sacred crusts of
filth, it takes something more than human Anglo-
Saxon courage to endure patiently the dirt-encum-
bered interiors of Italian railway trains. They are
doubtless as sacred from the labors of the cleaner as
a veritable bronze of the fourteenth century. Still,
after a hot bath it is possible once again to feel mod-
ern— and clean.

Modernity and cleanliness. No matter from
where you reach any of the great German capitals,
whether from the sunshine and rags of Italy or the
fog and rags of England, the contrast results, for all
who love wide spaces, clean streets and a general
average of wholesome prosperity, always in favor of
Germany.

I recall leaving London just after one of those tur-
bulent general elections which inaugurated the reign
of George V. There the grim contrasts between high
and low, between rich and poor, between fashion-
plates and shuffling tatterdemalions, had never before
seemed so vivid. Those very contrasts had loomed
angrily through the fog that obscured buildings and
horizons. Though the tumult and the shouting of
the great political contest itself might fade from one's
ears, the memory of the bitterness between the op-
posed forces lingered. Paris has had its mercurial
waves of passion and bloodshed as the commoner
frothed against the patrician ; Italy and all the other
Latin countries see socialism and anarchy taking
bloody shape now and again, and in Germany itself
the social-democrat is a factor which politically and
even diplomatically it has become necessary to reckon
with; yet in none of these countries, it must be con-

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 61

fessed, are the extremes farther apart than in Eng-
land, nor an equal depth of resentment under what
until quite recently seemed to the superficial observer
to be resignation.

I had to smile bitterly in noting, once again, the
splendid spaces, the clean streets, the magnificent
buildings, public and private, of such towns as Leip-
zig and Munich. Recalling some of the ridiculous
campaign cries from which I had but just come, as,
for instance, that which painted Germany as poverty-
stricken and its workmen forced to eat black bread
instead of white, I felt inclined either to laughter at
the general folly of things mundane or to tears at the
pitiable condition of the English proletariat. For this
at once forces itself upon our recognition whenever
we pass from the British Isles to Germany: though
there may, in the latter country, be distress and pov-
erty in mining or factory districts, it does not, as in
every great English town, obtrude itself upon the
most unwilling observer.

The arrogance and cold unfeelingness of the Eng-
lish have shown themselves in nothing more than in
the calm with which the prosperous classes there have
for years taken for granted, have seemed quite obliv-
ious to the horrid and filthy poverty that festers on
almost every corner of the most fashionable British
thoroughfare. Ragged wretches, male and female,
drunken often enough, begging or cringing, cursing
or crying, maudlin or sullen, inflict themselves upon
every wayfarer through London, or Liverpool, or
Manchester, or Newcastle, or almost any other city
you may name. The entire English institution of
prosperity for the few depends upon the servility or

62 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

the wretchedness of the many. The crossing sweeper
looks for a half-penny if he has cleared the mud from
before you, for which sum he will be as obsequious as
if he were your dog. You can hardly look about you
on Regent street or the Haymarket, especially at the-
ater time, in search for a taxi, but half a dozen sturdy
lads in rags will fight for the opportunity to save you
your search. Too long the Englishman of means has
taken all this servility as his right, and all this pov-
erty as much a matter of necessity as his own comfort.
If recent political events in England did nothing else,
they must at least have waked the dullard who pre-
tends to the "better class" into realization of the fact
that the monster underneath him is a living and omi-
nous reality.

For England, through this or that party in politics,
to pretend that the case of the German proletariat is
worse that its own — that is, indeed, to laugh! The
mines, the factories, the sweatshops of Germany may
have their human derelicts, too ; but so much is sure,
that these are never thrown upon the metropolitan
stream for all to see. Greater heights there may
be in England; but the depths are hideously
lower; the average of decent well-being is far greater
in Germany. You may walk the streets in any Ger-
man capital without finding a beggar. Even the
sight of women fulfilling the duties of a street-clean-
ing department in the great towns of Saxony, Prussia
and Bavaria is not likely to offend, but rather to
amuse you. These are eminently vigorous and able-
bodied persons ; they will slang you roundly if you do
not give proper way to them as they strew sand upon
the icy pavements, and they make you smile most

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 63

grimly if you remember the able-bodied loafers who
parade London perpetually declaring — for political
and mendacious reasons — that uall we want is work."
Why, those street-cleaning dames of Leipzig and
Munich even compare favorably, if you have any
sense of humor and balance, with the suffragette per-
sons of England. Sturdy, wholesome creatures these
are; they are pictures for any artist's interest; they
wear slouch hats and long-caped cloaks with strapped
belts; their faces, in the cold weather, are always half
muffled to the eyes, and until he has looked closely
the stranger is likely to be in doubt as to whether he is
regarding men or women. They clean the streets,
they strew sand, and they tend the switches for the
municipally-owned street cars. It would be interest-
ing to propose to these good dames the predicament in
which the British workmen has, since time immemo-
rial, pretended to be; the mere sight of them proves
admirably that for those who genuinely wish it the
world has always work.

Yet it is of this German country, whose towns
show no rags or poverty, where streets are clean and
spacious, where all look healthy and content, that
English newspapers paint pictures in which bitter pov-
erty and black bread are large in the foreground I

MODERN, clean and artistic, Munich is all of these.
Time was when Paris was clean; it is clean no more;
the flying dirt there goes far toward obscuring its
charm and dispelling its glamour. Time was, also,
when Paris held without dispute the position of the
world's chief center of artistic student life. That
place is now seriously threatened by Munich. Even

64 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

the carnival in Paris has become a rather wearisome
farce; in Munich the carnival and all its aftermaths
have still the real flavor of spontaneity. As for the
modernity in Munich, you cannot be there long be-
fore it greets you. The street cars no longer, as in
Italy, seem intended to remind you of how much more
foolish it is to pay money to ride when it is faster to
walk, and as for the taximeter motor cars, they whizz
by you with the most bewildering and beguiling fre-
quence. Nor, if you have fallen to the motor cab's
temptation, will you be long left in doubt as to what in
Munich is the prevailing tone. As you are whirling
toward the English garden and all the fashionable
villegiatura nearby, what is it that the driver of your
car suddenly points out to you?

The magnificent house of Franz Stuck, the painter !

The spirit of the town is in that episode. It is a
city of art and artists. Not necessarily artists merely
in paint. From the house of Stuck to the Prinz-
Regenten Theater, where they do the operas of Wag-
ner so conscientiously, is but a step away. And it is
Munich which supports the Kuenstler Theater, which
is truly an artistic theater, created by and through
genuine artists. Some observations upon the art of
the theater in Germany necessarily follow all this
contemplation of art development in Munich. I shall
come to that presently. The point for immediate con-
templation is this : Can you imagine an episode like
that of the motorman and the house of Stuck on the
American side of the water? Your driver might
point out to you the house of this or that millionaire;
but, after that, and a magnificent guess at the number
of dollars represented by the aforesaid architectural

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 65

pile — No ; I think that would be the sum total of Ex-
hibit A to Z on our side of the water. Whereas the
motorman of Munich not only pointed out, first and
foremost, the house of a great painter, but also took
it for granted that we knew who he was. Had we
not known, he would not condescend to explain.

At the very mention of Stuck's name, our too long
dormant spirit of modernity awoke to complete alert-
ness. We recalled, indeed, by way of finally van-
quishing the antique spirit that had ruled us while in
Italy, that, however Philistine the sentiment might
seem, we preferred Stuck's portrait of himself, done
specially for the Uffizi gallery in Florence, but lately
hung there, to an acre or so of the redoubtable an-
tiquities underneath that same roof. For years that
crowded room just as you enter the Uffizi, where
those wonderful portraits hang that men like Millais,
and Herkomer and Andreas Zorn did of themselves,
had seemed to us one of the most interesting in the
place. Now they have had to open a new room, in
one of the galleries near the stairway that leads to-
ward the Pitti, to hold the later additions in this sort.
In that new room hang portraits, by themselves, of
Franz Stuck, of William Chase and of John Sargent.
For our Sargent was, as you may have forgotten, born
in Florence. So, as we thought of that wonderful
specimen of paint and self-portraiture, Stuck's picture
of himself in the Uffizi, we declared it worth a wilder-
ness of Leonardos — and at once, lest some Italian
had overheard our thought, told the motorman to
make for the New Pinakothek. For there, as we
remember, hangs Stuck's terrible and compelling pic-
ture of "Sin."

66 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Roaming once more about the New Pinakothek,
gloating again over the wonderful collection of Von
Lenbach's masterpieces there, and trying to deter-
mine for the hundredth time whether his men or his
women are most admirable, whether his Bismarck is
a nobler work than his Saharet, or his Cleo more
memorable than either, we observed how, in the
newer additions to this gallery, the passage of time
was being definitely marked for us. There, definitely
established on those walls, are pictures by men who,
not so many years ago, were held most violently seces-
sionistic, who stood for everything that was young
and overbold.

Within the decade I recall a visit to the Berlin
Secession, on the Kurfiirsten Damm, where I first
encountered the curious art of Gustav Klimt. The
golden mosaic decorative art of Alphonse Mucha, the
Hungarian, was then still observable on the poster-
pillars of Paris ; the art of Klimt, as first I saw it, had
something of that goldleaf flavor, combined with the
violent purples of the ultra-impressionists. And now
a small gem of this, golden and subtle without any
exaggeration, hangs in the Pinakothek !

About the art of Klimt, practically unknown out-
side of German countries, I find my first impression,
gained six years ago, worth recalling. In none of his
newer canvases, either in the Miethke Gallery in
Vienna, or in Hermann Bahr's villa m St. Veit
(where, within the twelvemonth, I saw Klimt can-
vases as full of magic and intoxication as a dream of
Aphrodite in a sea of gold), have I found anything
to put my earliest appreciation out of court. So that
it is pertinent to give those early notes of mine here,

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 67

the more so as they stir in many ways artistic com-
parisons that are not without profit.

It was the first time the Secessionists of Berlin
showed their work in the new building on the Ku'r-
fuersten Damm. I went, in despair at the nullity of the
convenional Salons, expecting such comfort as, in
earlier years, the Secession had given me through
triumphs by Rodin, and the loaned wonders of Manet
and Monet. But horror was now piled on horror;
the wildest freaks of woolwork, of purples, of green
and of saffron anatomy, of sheer ugliness and folly,
ruthlessly committed for their own sakes. Yet all
was not a void. A notable trio still claimed my de-
light. That delight I set down. It follows here :

"At least three men remain notable — Franz Stuck
and Koloman Moser, each long since famous, and
Gustav Klimt, a new man. Professor Moser again
shows us specimens of jewelry and metal work that
make us eternally dissatisfied with all that our home
shops show us. And of Stuck, here is again his fa-
mous 'Sphinx.' Nothing new to say of this master-
piece in the allegory of flesh; cruel still those hard
breasts ; cold still that lowering face, promising volup-
tuousness, and assuring destruction. New canvases,
by Stuck, are two. One shows Susanna at the Bath,
the tawny girl curtaining herself against the senile
eyes of the bearded watchers. The other shows a
Fight for the Female. As combatants, two hairy,
barbarian males; as prize and judge, a woman. The
combatants are crouched toward each other; their
eyes glitter brutally, their naked hands curl to claws;
all their muscles quiver in rage and lust; the very hair
of their beards and their naked bodies takes on the

68 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

air of bristles. Beside them, disdainful, at once the
prize and the princess, the lady of battles and the bat-
tle's booty, stands the woman, tawny, sombre, cruel,
the same woman of the same artist's 'Sphinx,' repell-
ing, yet attractive, like a dark, alluring vice. Un-
couth, brutal, barbarian, the picture reminds of Rops ;
against the exquisitely sharpened wit of the Flemish
master you have the hard animality of the Teuton.

"Finally, one new man to be noted internationally,
Gustav Klimt. A curious craft, his. A roomful of
his work displays his heights, his depths. Women,
all women. A method, if one must attempt compari-
son, compound of Mucha and Botticelli. Do you re-
call, perchance, the glorious golden panels that Al-
phonse Mucha wasted upon the world's walls some
years ago in advertisement of Bernhardt's 'Gis-
monda?' Well, in much that fashion are wrought
the best of these decorative canvases by Klimt. There
is much gold and mosaic color in the background,
much tenuous vapor in the figures themselves, a trans-
parency and vagueness that is as if a girl of Botticelli
were seen through the thin translucent glass of a bowl
by Alexander. These are slim gilt souls that shine
through slim gilt bodies. In several of the canvases
only the vagueness and the thinness remain; but in
one, at least, a definite result shines clear. This is in
the canvas showing Judith. The triumphant Jewess,
most wonderfully vivified, with lids half shut, the
upper lip lifted to disdain and to triumph, in her hand
the head of Holofernes. A trite enough subject.
But for once this artist has shown that through his
vapors, his gilt, his decorative mosaics and his flow-
ing lines of supple limbs, he can call forth a real soul."

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 69

To-day not only Klimt, but many other whilom
Secessionists hang upon the walls of Pinakothek.
(About Klimt, by the way, I hold it a pity that only
through a luxurious and expensive portfolio issued by
Miethke of Vienna are his newer designs to be seen.
He rarely exhibits, and reproductions are barred by
the firm just named.) The story of youth rebellious,
old age conservative, repeats itself in every century,
and it is emphasized especially now by the fact that in
Munich the artists of the Secession no longer hold
their exhibit apart from the academic Salon; the two
bodies now exhibit amicably together.

Since all this breaking away from established aca-
demic groups, all this secession and all the coming to-
gether again has taken place in one generation, it is
interesting to note how in each recurring annual ex-
hibition of paintings in Munich, to say nothing of the
New Pinakothek itself, the work of former Secession-
ists may be found. Of these are Adolf Muenzer,
Max Slevogt, Louis Corinth. (Decorations of
Muenzer, as of another artist familiar to readers of
Jugend, Julius Diez, fill much space in the Kur-
haus in Wiesbaden, affording an interesting contrast
to the methods of our own Abbey, Sargent or Par-
rish.) Of the Slevogt portrait of Tilla Durieux
which I remarked as notable when I saw it in that
Munich gallery I was sharply reminded when the
Pdw-Jagow-Flaubert incident set all Germany laugh-
ing in the spring of 1911. Berlin's Police President,
it will be recalled, censored the issue of Pan print-
ing pages from an early diary of Flaubert; shortly
afterwards, watching, in his capacity as stage censor,
a rehearsal, Herr von Jagow takes a fancy to his

70 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

neighbor, the actress Tilla Durieux; he writes her a
note, underscoring his official interest in the theater,
and wishes to be asked to her apartment that after-
noon. Tilla Durieux, as all Berlin but Herr von
Jagow knew, is the wife of the millionaire owner of
the just suppressed Pan! Amid the roars of
laughter, I thought of the Slevogt portrait of the
Durieux that had been in Munich. Nor was that,
for me, the end of the incident; Herr von Jagow's
rancor was not stilled; he suppressed, presently, an-
other issue of Pan, to which I, following a kindly
suggestion of Dr. Alfred Kerr's, was a contributor.
Not my article, however, but one by Herbert Eulen-
berg, offended Von Jagow's nicety on that occasion.
To Herr von Jagow I must ever feel grateful. He
gave me, by the colossal mistake he made, one of the
heartiest laughs in my life, and he helped something
of my writing into the rare field of confiscation.

ON the board of directors of the Secessionists are
to-day such men as Von Stuck, Angelo Jank, Von Kel-
ler and Von Habermann. Von Keller is portraitist;
Jank paints horses and cavalrymen. It is Hugo von
Habermann whose work is least known abroad. Se-
cessionist once, now one of the grand old men of Ger-
man art. With the Von Kellers, the Muenzers, the
Stucks and the Lenbachs, some of his canvases hang
in the New Pinakothek. One year I was fortunate
enough to see in Munich a three-man show, in which
Von Habermann was represented by no less than one
hundred and thirty-odd canvases.

From all these, too many, pictures this seemed to
cry out most loudly: Here is a great master of male

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 71

portraiture who has chosen all his life to paint
women. You could number the men portrayed on
your fingers; the female faces and forms were tiring
to count. Women, many women, dressed and un-
dressed, this painter has painted. He gives you
mostly dark figures who are by no means beautiful,
but in whom there is always some definite trait of
character or suggestion. Yellows, roses and violets
he loves in his handling of stuffs. He paints the fe-
male form as critic rather than as lover. In a touch
of characteristic profile he finds his delight, and even
exaggerates it toward caricature. For 40 years he
has been a growing dominant figure in German art.
In his early pictures, done in the seventies, you will
find the tendencies of the earliest Secessionists. Even
then he was himself a Secessionist, in that he never
went the academic way.

Those essential characteristics of his that deprive
his women of beauty while accentuating their anatom-
ical ruggedness go exactly to the strengthening of his
portraits of men. Working always in swift strokes
that give many of his canvases the effect of sketches,
one conceives his painting mood to have been an iron-
ically grim realism. One does not know whether most
to admire the consistency with which he made all his
subjects angular in contour and expression, or to won-
der where he found so many models to his unsparing
hand. For German women, after all, are not like
that. One must not expect, of course, mere Germans
from a German ; but it does arrest one a little to note
how, in a lifetime of work, this German seems never
once to have departed from depicting the type he had
chosen from the first. Only once, perhaps, does he

72 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

approach the fat-cheeked teuton type as popularly
imagined; in his "Maid in the Open" he shows a girl
thick-lipped and almost heavy with passion. Mostly,
however, we see, over and over again, those sharp
lines, sharp features, sharp elbows; everything sharp;
blues and purples too sharp upon the flesh-tints;
women who are sometimes provoking, but nearly
always ugly; women naked and women clothed;
women — hardly anything but women. A nude by
Von Habermann reminds the observer of little save
the old paganism, to the effect that the boy's body is
more beautiful than the girl's.

At least twice Habermann approaches perilously
close to methods that Whistler made his own. Once
in No. 6 of the year 1875, called "The Nun." The
black-robed figure, shading imperceptibly into the
gray background; the silhoutted face that might be
mistaken for a man's; these all recall Whistler irre-
sistibly. Again, almost to the butterfly, almost to the
framed picture hung in the left upper corner, almost
to the very title, indeed, there is Habermann's "Por-
trait of the Artist's Mother." The old lady lives and
smiles at you ; she is more in the foreground than in
the famous Whistler canvas; yet to miss the compar-
ison is impossible. Habermann must have dared his
trick intentionally; so great a master of technique
would scorn to fear the parallel. With the best in-
tentions, however, the German has failed to make a
picture that will keep as placid a charm, as vigorous
a strength as that noble picture in the Luxembourg.
Tricks in technique have always delighted this mas-
ter; the two most arresting nudes he has done are his
"Nude in Green" and his "Remorse." In this latter

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 73

picture those qualities of his which may have affected
the observer unpleasantly hardly count at all, for the
reason that the figure is shown with its face hidden
and buried in the pillows of a couch; the back of the
figure seems perfect in anatomy, and even the angu-
larities typical of this painter emphasize, in this case,
the peculiar tragedy of the situation. The very shad-
ows in the neck and the shoulder help the text the pic-
ture is intended to convey.

Perhaps it is the consensus of opinion that Von
Habermann is a great painter of women. I conclude
otherwise. I hold him a fine painter of men who has
wasted himself on women. As for his models, they
have proved that it is possible to be interesting with-
out being beautiful. Of the German female figure, it
is as interesting and individual an impression that one
gains in this man's work as, say, from the work of the
late F. von Reznicek. If Von Habermann seems to
intend to give us the idea that the female form is sim-
ply an anatomical study in angles, Von Reznicek for
years imposed upon the world at large a fantastic ver-
sion of feminine beauty to which the facts never cor-
responded.

THE case of the late Von Reznicek leads immedi-
ately to the great gulf fixed between the Munich car-
nival of fact and the carnival of fancy. Even so, the
actual Maxim's in Paris is a distinct disenchantment
to those who have known only the Maxim's of legend.
For years a group of artists with headquarters in
Munich, Von Reznicek at the head, has been filling
the world with a notion of the gayety and charm of
Munich in the season of carnival, which has attracted

74 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

and fascinated wherever seen. Neither the beauty
nor the so-called bohemianism of Paris ever presented
greater freedom from conventional restraints, or a
higher average of feminine beauty. Arresting in out-
line, impeccable in drawing and fascinating in color,
the sketches were absolutely the world's models of
carnival gayety.

Two years ago Von Reznicek died. The volumes
of Simplicissimus, and particularly the special num-
bers devoted to carnival during the last 10 years con-
tained abundant proofs of the truth of the assertion
that this Hungarian artist drew from fancy rather
than from fact. In the very fact of his Hungarian
nationality lies the crux of the argument. He was
painting always the Viennese girl whom best he loved,
rather than the Munich girls who were pretended as
his subjects. And out of what actuality does the Mar-
quis Franz de Bayros draw those wonderful women
which he repeats over and over for our somewhat dis-
turbed delight? They are as shepherdesses of Wat-
teau or Sevres; they go as daintily as verses of De
Musset or Dobson, and they are more shamelessly
suggestive than Beardsley, less brutal and so more
dangerous than Rops. The man cannot draw cor-
rectly, and yet his false lines have an allure of grace,
of charm, and of mystery that almost atones for what
they have of perversity. One thing must be allowed
De Bayros, he has no superior in arrangement of
skirts and frou-frous, in multiplying adornment which
yet hides nothing. His ladies are like those who in
the longest of skirts, the most voluminous of laces,
suddenly kick you the most astounding can-can, flash-
ing at you all that seemed so completely hidden. No

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 75

beauty of the Pompadour period had ever fairer form
under fairer raiment than these of De Bayros, whose
bookplates alone will keep his name sweet, even if
much of his art is by no means of the sweetest. Now,
in what corner of Munich does De Bayros find his
models ? No, no ; it is all artistic glamour ; the eye of
the beholder. Most stupendous of follies, to seek
always the explanation of an art, the originals for a
story, the models for a picture; to think that a writer
is to be found in his work. Child's play, stuff for im-
mature minds, whatever their age. Not even in car-
nival, when Munich does its best to be gay, to be ro-
mantic, to be beautiful, are these lovely ladies of Von
Reznicek, of De Bayros and of half a dozen others
to be seen.

Actual experiences of the carnival in Munich — or,
as the Muenchener himself calls it, "Fasching" —
proves that all this artistic glamour, and almost all
of this feminine beauty, exists entirely in the eye of
the beholder. The population of Munich goes about
the business of carnival gayety with a determination
that is admirable, but which does not lift either male
or female from an inherent bourgeoisie. You see
the streets filled almost every night for the weeks be-
fore Mardi Gras with men and women, old and
young, fantastically arrayed, and bound for balls, for
masquerades or other timely festivals; but those ar-
resting beauties, those fashion plates, those fascinat-
ing forms in dress and undress which the artists have
for years been giving us as typical of the time and the
place — those do not exist. Even at the Deutsche
Theater, at the Bal Pare, while you see a welter of
women as gay as impertinent, as thirsty, as light of

76 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

feet and doubtless of morals as the most epicurean
might wish, yet the world they represent is artistically
far below that world this group of artists has con-
spired to fashion. In this group, besides those names
have been Galanis, Kley, Heilemann and many
others. Most of them, as has been said, have im-
posed their memories of Hungarian, of Viennese, of
Polish, and of Parisian compatriots upon the world.

That gulf between the physical exterior of the
population of Munich and its artistic interest remains
one of the mysteries hard for the alien to solve.
Munich discusses everything artistic under the sun,
the Wagner or Mozart festivals, the singing at Bay-
reuth, the playing of the peasants in the Ammergau,
the spectacles of Max Reinhardt, the anecdotes of
Roda Roda, the newest operetta at the Theater an
der Wien or on the Gaertner Platz, the pictures —
those thousands of pictures, new and old, which sur-
round us always in Munich. It discusses all these
things, and meanwhile every other male in Munich
looks like a butcher or a beer keg, and every other
female like a cook.. The miracle of how the Bava-
rian beauty manages by inartistic apparel to defeat
the ends of nature may be solved when we discover
how the Munich artists, facing the awful facts, con-
tinue to present those fascinating visions of theirs.

For the ironic contemplation carnival, whether in
Paris, in New Orleans, in Mobile, in Monte Carlo or
in Munich, tends necessarily to disenchantment. That
the real spirit of the real article exists best in Munich
there can be as little denying as that this same best is
still far behind the artist's version. The very fact,
however, that the Munich carnival has stimulated so

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 77

much memorable art, not only in the world of paint,
but in literature, as in the pantomimes of O. J. Bier-
baum, proves the sincerity and value of this carnival
spirit. When Frank Wedekind wrote an obvious
sketch of Von Reznicek in his curious play, "Oaha,"
he added merely one more line for the future histo-
rian of the South German art movements to record.
The Munich population itself may look like — well,
what it does look like ; the Munich police may try, by
forbidding dominos at masked balls, or curtains be-
fore chambres separees, or by suggesting an amuse-
ment tax, to damp the ardor of this carnival spirit,
yet it remains with all its disenchantments one of the
things in the modern world most worth while having
tasted. None that has come under spell either of the
carnival itself or of the art it has called forth in
Munich will ever readily forget either.

II

ILLUSTRATIONS AND POSTERS

ALL the arts touch one another; one incites the
other; the temptation to wander from studios to the-
aters, from paintings to plays or music or books is
constantly harassing the critic. As a mere mundane
mood like carnival (though some of its beginnings are
in things professedly not mundane) has stimulated
paint, and literature and pantomime, as I pointed out
just now, so do all these paintings that are spread be-
fore us in Munich start constant reflections upon kin-
dred arts. Yet, before I come to any of these, there
remain two details that seem valuable to art lovers.

78 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

One concerns the art of the affiche, or artistic poster;
the other is about various inexpensive forms of art that
even the poorest amateur should be able to afford.

Few visitors to Munich are aware that an annual
event there is the auction of the originals used by that
most celebrated of artistic weeklies, Jugend. Inti-
macy with the contributors to the early volumes of
that paper means intimacy with painters who are to-
day upon the wralls of the Pinakothek. I emphasize
this, lest pseudo-artistic snobs suppose these drawings
and sketches of little value. In nothing is good taste
so profitable as in art ! You must have courage, and
taste, a generation before the world's chorus begins.
There is the whole secret. It is true the work sold in
one of these auctions partake largely of caricature,
besides having the defect of showing that it has been
prepard for reproduction; as in so many cases where
artists work for engraving, or lithograph, or color-
printing, the print shows none of the crudities of the
original. Nevertheless, if Americans who wish to
decorate their apartments, their little houses, their
bungalows, or even their town houses, inexpensively
and yet artistically, would make a point of going to
Munich every spring and attending those auction
sales there they would be able to have on their walls
something better than the Gibson, and Fisher, and
Christy prints they now enjoy, in community with a
few other million amateurs of the same taste. Those
color sketches, for purposes of print in that Munich
periodical, are, after all, actual originals. The same
thing may be said of the color etchings which distin-
guished artists all over Europe are now beginning
more and more to produce. The small householder

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 79

and art lover pays for a color etching by a good artist
about one-tenth of what he would have to pay for an
original; yet he knows that only a limited number of
other copies exist and that the artist has signed each
copy. Only in the last two or three years has any
effort been made in America to emphasize the value
and delight of this form of art. Some of us have not
visited Paris ever, in the last decade, without acquir-
ing at least one such treasure. They do not cost more
than some men pay for a dinner. In Paris the names
of Laffitte, of Robbe, of Osterlind, of Mueller, of
Willette, are specially connected with this form of
art, and the wonderful landscapes of Thoma are
hardly equalled even by an original oil or water color.
In Munich the show of this branch of art is increas-
ing. T. Franz Simon of Paris has done color etch-
ings. Such of them as portray scenes and moods of
Paris are worth attention, but his sketch of Hyde
Park in London too clearly reveals the haziness of his
method. One sees in that etching too vividly that he
does not know good horseflesh or accoutrement when
he sees it. One or two Austriaris, as F. Michl of
Vienna and August Broemse of Prag, have taken up
this branch, as have Axel Krause of Copenhagen,
Henri Forrestier of Geneva and Alexander Lieb-
mann of Munich; but in most cases one can admire
little save the evidence that these artists are alive to
this essentially modern method of supplying actual
original art to that portion of the public which cannot
afford paintings. In Florence, I remember, we had
looked in vain, and only found one single artist, a
woman, M. de Cordoba, attempting color etchings,
and in Venice it had not been much better; there the

8o VAGABOND JOURNEYS

sum total was two artists who had reproduced the in-
evitable lagoon and gondolier.

The similar art of color etching from wood cuts
seems, in the Munich show of this year, to be largely
chosen by women artists. Broncia Pinell-Koller of
Vienna, Anne Poll of Miinchen, Louis Pollitzer of
Miinchen, Anna Ostroumowa-Lebeddewa of St.
Petersburg and Dora Seifert of Dresden — these
were the foremost in this art patterned after
the old Japanese methods. In America this art
is still in its infancy. There was a Norwegian
painter in Chicago, whose name will not come at
this moment's bidding, and there was once an exhibi-
tion of a few specimens by F. A. Nankivell on Fifth
avenue, but to all intents this other, with that of color
etching from copper, is still a virgin field on our side.
All these forms of art, color etchings from wood or
metal, sketches done for illustration, and the rest, are
inexpensive and genuine.

THERE remain those posters which in design and
execution are artistic. Some years ago England and
America took up the collecting of these, and it looked
for a time as if the whole tone of pictorial advertising
would improve. But there has come a reaction, so
that once again only France, Italy and Germany offer
the passer-by posters from which, if he have any fine
taste, he will not hurry away as fast as possible. It
is by its posters, even if one avoids galleries and
museums on principle, that Munich proclaims imme-
diately to the visitor its supremacy as an art center.
Here, again, I had the frightful contrast hit me like
a blow when I reached Munich after the last general

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 81

election in England. Nothing in all that bitter polit-
ical struggle had been more awful and inartistic than
the average poster used on the hoardings. Though
literally acres of space must have been used through-
out England in this way, so that for the time being
the notoriety of soaps, beers, whiskies and actors was
obscured, yet there was not one single work of art in
the lot. Crude and clumsy depictions of melodra-
matic texts; flaring letters and not one single artistic
line. As for anything signed by an artist of any dis-
tinction, that was out of the question. One had to
wonder, recalling the work such men as Dudley
Hardy, the Beggar-staffs, Raven-Hill and many
others were doing ten years ago, and as some few,
notably Hassall, are still doing to-day, why the men
in charge of political parties in England are so much
more stupid than the men in charge of comic operas,
of periodicals and of champagne. There was never a
campaign in which the assistance of the English silk-
stocking element was more needed, so that the argu-
ment about the need for only the workingman's en-
thusiasm falls to the ground.

The first quarter of an hour in Munich brought
those inartistic London memories closer. Here, too,
were acres of space covered, but by posters that were
almost always a delight to contemplate. You were
likely, in fact, to stop and examine them at your leis-
ure. Whether, for art shows, for American bars, for
this or that masked ball, or cafe or restaurant, the
poster itself was nearly always attractive, of manage-
able size, and by an artist who had not been afraid
to sign his name. The most cursory stroll showed
Adolf Munzer's three-sheet for the Bals Fare's at the

82 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

German Theater that carnival season (and Miinzer is
now prominent on the walls of the permanent state-
owned academy buildings throughout Germany) and
the smaller specimens of I. R. Wetzel of Jugend;
of Leo Putz, done for the Modern Gallery, where the
strange paintings of Max Slevogt are on view, while
for such institutions as the Kunstverein, the Restau-
rant Platzl, the carnival dances at the Colosseum, the
Carnival Association of Munich, the Simplicissimus
Masked Ball and the Simplicissimus Bierhall, the
Casino Bar, the Maxim American Bar, and the Savoy
Bar, the Dance Festival of the Suabian Brewery, the
sporting goods shop of one Wagner, and innumerable
others, there were posters, often charming, always
arresting and nearly always of good workmanship,
by such signers as O. Graf, H. Treiber, Blecker, Back-
mund, Kneip, Meier and Treiber. Finally, there was
the sphinx-like head framed in gold mosaic by F. von
Stuck, advertising the winter show of the Seces-
sionists.

With that poster of Stuck' s we come back to the
Secessionists, you see, who are now hand in glove in
amity with the academicians. We are whirling once
more in the motor-car, and the driver is pointing out
to us ... I ask you to note how in Munich art
dominates everything. Stray as you will, wander into
the most trivial asides, it is to art we return. For
Munich is the greatest, the freest of all art towns.
She does not so much compel as lure.

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 83
III

ART AND THE OPEN-AIR THEATER

EYES tired, feet sore, lungs choked on air breathed
over and over again, even the most devoted art lovers
greet with relief the passing from picture galleries
into fresh air. Let us take a whiff of fresh air 1 Fresh
air in art, bribe me properly and I will write you a
book upon that. Neither through literature, nor gal-
leries, nor the theater does fresh air blow as it should.
Wilde cultivated literature without it; Nietzsche
might not have gone mad so soon if in his philosophy
and his life there had been more outdoor ozone. . . .
I am coming, thus leisurely, to that fascinating theme,
the open-air theater. It has interested me as much
as the more heralded business at Bayreuth, or the
Passion Play. To all these you come easily and logic-
ally from Munich, and the pedigree of the open-air
theater movement may be traced to Oberammergau,
to various lesser known villages in the Bavarian high-
lands, in Bohemia, and in Tyrol. There native tradi-
tion and legend have succeeded in keeping something
of Homeric peasant-lore and natural sense of drama
intact. From such beginnings eventually developed
the serious evolution toward the open-air theater.

All the arts touch; I say it again. Fresh air in all
the arts I That has been my cry in many times and
places. Some years ago, when the art colony at
Lyme, in Connecticut, was just born, I aroused the
laughter of some of those painting persons by con-
tending that, for the decoration of town mansions
only one sort of picture, or one sort of landscape, was

84 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

fit, namely, that showing clear sunlight and fresh air.
Town houses are dark and shadowy places; put into
them a Troyon, a Corot, or even an Inness, and, un-
less it is a proper gallery with north light or glassed
roofs, you are but adding darkness unto darkness.
The further I fare, the more I uphold that theory of
mine. The open-air theater in Germany has fixed me
in my belief.

It may clear the air a little to touch upon the title
of this form of theater. Heretofore, in English, we
have gone to the rococo Italian phrase "al fresco. "
Just as we have gone to the Greeks and the Latins for
our stadiums and our amphitheaters. The German
has gone, it seems to me, to the French for his title.
He has taken the "plein air" of the landscape paint-
ers, the impressionists, the vibrationists, and all the
rest of them, and he has called his new art form "Die
Freilicht-Biihne," which is, literally, "plein air," or
"free-light stage ;" and the best word of our own that
we can give is, I maintain, simply the open-air theater.
The most definite meaning lies in that phrase; the
whole setting of the art, and the whole art itself, is
most clearly so expressed.

Let me apologize a little to our friends, the Ger-
mans, for having, in times past, accused their drama
of a lack of fresh air. Some of them, through this
fresh-air movement we are now regarding, have come
to realize what was the matter. Year after year it
was my habit to return from Germanic theaters with
my most poignant memory having to do with
crowded, tight-shut, stuffy theaters, in which stuffy,
unnatural art got iself performed. One year I went
so far as to say that the German theater would never

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 85

progress as long as it went on breathing foul air. The
average German theater was as impervious to ozone
as the average railway compartment in which the
majority is German.

I do not say that criticism from Anglo-Saxons had
anything to do with it. The Teuton is still somewhat
inclined to regard anything save the bombastic as be-
ing mere airy journalistic nothing. But the fact re-
mains: To-day the open-air theater movement is a
most conspicuous and interesting artistic detail in all
Germany. In the open air, in fresh ozone, and in the
natural decoration of the unaltered landscape, dra-
matic art in Germany has at last sought refuge from
the sudden closed spaces in which too long it had been
confined. The progressing theory that we should
live more and more outdoors, should eat and drink
and sleep winter and summer outdoors, has extended
itself to the art of the theater, until we have this pres-
ent, definite, distinct cult.

While in America this tendency takes hold slowly,
and but casually, as in the case of Maude Adams, or
the sylvan spectacles of the Bohemian Club of San
Francisco, in Europe, and especially in German-
speaking countries, the open-air theater is spreading
its influence farther and farther. All such outdoor
performances are within easy reach of the ordinary
traveler, all with regular repertoires, and all well
worth special trips. Whoso loves the drama for its
own sake, aside from social or snobbish calculations,
should not return from Europe without having vis-
ited one or another of these open-air theaters. Among
those in continuous operation are theaters in Thale,
in the Hartz Mountains; in Nerothal, near Wies-

86 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

baden, and at Castle Hertenstein, near Lucerne. The
theater in the Hartz has been giving its performances
for no less than eight summers past. Those near
Wiesbaden and Lucerne date only from Whitsuntide
of 1909. In Orange, and elsewhere in France; in
the Arena Goldoni, in Florence, and many other
spots, these episodes in outdoor drama have occurred.
I must, however, content myself with but one part of
the field, and choose there one typical instance.

THE main point that has so far developed from
such experiments by the Germans is that the classic
drama of the Greeks and of the giants like Shakes-
peare and Goethe best lends itself to this setting. Es-
sentials are unity of scene, and primitive expression.
Large elemental emotions come to their fullest value
under these circumstances. Natural men and women
may be successfully presented; finesse and delicate
shading fall flat. The plays should be such as to im-
press the far spectator who has not clearly heard the
speech itself. Great legends, plays of great histor-
ical or internationally symbolic significance, are the
ones most chosen. These were the plays performed
at Thale in the Hartz, though also modern matter
was included, as may be seen from this partial list of
the repertoire for 1909: Heinrich von Kleist's
"Herrmannsschlacht;" Hebbel's "Gygest and His
Ring;" Hauptmann's uThe Sunken Bell;" Suder-
mann's "Teja;" in addition to several well-known
Shakespeare and Ibsen and Goethe pieces. In the
Hartz Theater, moreover, one found the department
of farce not altogether excluded, as it is on the other
stages of this sort.

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 87

Vitally interesting was the play which Ernst von
Wolzogen specially wrote for the open-air theater
at Nerothal, near Wiesbaden. Its name was "Die
Maibraut" ("The May Bride"). There has been lit-
tle in the conspicuous liberalism of the dramatic arts
in Germany during the past two decades with which
Von Wolzogen has not had something to do. He
has written librettos and composed songs, written
novels and stories and serious plays, and managed
theaters, and, in case of need, acted and sung in his
own person.

Now, when it was a question of the new enterprise
set in the rocky cleft of the Nero Valley, near Wies-
baden, it was Von Wolzogen who wrote a piece to fit
the occasion like a glove. He took for his text cer-
tain mythologic or legendary revelations of Guido
von List (great in Germanic lore) and spun out of
those threads a great symbolic drama in which the
elements of light, and earth, and winter, of gods and
of men all have place and dramatic force. Tragedy
and comedy in their most elemental expression were
used; also dances, choruses and processionals, so that
the piece gained an almost operatic largeness. Herr
Rother composed music specially for the play. All
this against the massive cloven rocks that serve as
background gained an almost magic effect. The piece
was an unqualified success in that open-air atmos-
phere for which it was intended.

Herr von Wolzogen, then, is to be noted as the
first playwright directly to write for this newer ver-
sion of the open-air theater. Now Wiesbaden offers
a prize for the play given at Nerothal, and in addi-
tion to the present theater among the rocks, a second

88 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

smaller stage is used on the island in the garden of
the Kurhaus in Wiesbaden itself.

If Von Wolzogen is the first consciously to write
a piece to fit this new development in theatric art, it
should not be forgotten that one Friedrich Lieland
years ago wrote a play, "Wieland der Schmied"
( Wieland the Smith) , specially with a view to its per-
formance in such surroundings as at that time the
Berg Theater (Mountain Theater) in the Hartz
alone exemplified. Also J. V. Widmann wrote a
tragedy, "Oenone," entirely in the belief that, if
played at all, it should be played in the open. And
of course similar dreams have come to dramatists in
all ages, all languages. Against the hampering and
confining influences of the inclosed theater there has
always been more or less revolt. Only now does it
seem to have come to effective expression.

The German playwright, however, who comes
most frequently to performances at such theaters
is Franz Grillparzer. Until, the other year, Haupt-
mann founded his play of "Elga" upon an old play
of Grillparzer's, modern Anglo-Saxons had come to
forget that such a man had ever existed. But the
Germans have never forgotten; if you will scan the
number of performances that plays enjoy annually
in German lands, you will always find the works of
Grillparzer well to the fore. He satisfied admirably
the German desire for fine rhetoric, and for more or
less fatal tragedy. The German, as you may re-
member, goes us always one better in the direction of
dramatic fatalities ; he not only knows farce, and
comedy, and tragedy, but he also knows (and pre-
fers) what he calls the "Trauerspiel," which (you

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 89

cannot properly translate it unless you contrive such
abomination as mourning play, or funeral play)
means that at least one corpse must confront the final
curtain.

Then the hardened German playgoer, having had
the proper amount of murder and sudden death
that he had paid to see. went home and made a splen-
did supper. In "Trauerspiel" there was never a
more prolific and successful German than Grill-
parzer. On the repertoire of the open-air theater
Luzern-Hertenstein were Ibsen; also Schiller's
"Bride of Messina," Goethe's "Torquato Tasso"
and "Iphigenia in Tauris," Sophocles' "Oedipus"
and Hoelderlin's "Death of Empedocles"; but you
will find most of Grillparzer's, namely, "Sappho,"
"Medea" and "Hero and Leander."

It is a performance at Hertenstein that I take as
typical, and try to sketch here. Three times a week,
weather permitting, plays were given. The play
began at 3 in the afternoon and ended about 6.
You go by one of the lake steamers; in twenty min-
utes the boat touches at Hertenstein, the first land-
ing. In fact, from any of the hotels near the Kur-
saal in Lucerne you may plainly see Hertenstein
itself. What was once an ancestral castle, Schloss
Hertenstein, is now modernized into a hotel. From
the landing you walk, always ascending, to the hill-
top, in perhaps fifteen minutes. You find yourself
on a peninsula between the main body of the Lake
of Four Cantons and that bend which makes toward
Kiissnacht, where, by the way, Goethe once spent a
few days.

You can see both these sheets of water, Alp-in-

9o VAGABOND JOURNEYS

closed, before you. Below you, against the slope of
the hill, benches are set, the semi-circular, in the
classic amphitheatric form. At base is the stage,
simply the green sward, with noble giant chestnut
trees at back and in the foreground. Leafage and
foliage everywhere. Just where the hill slopes
sheerly down toward the water is set a temple with
six pillars, simply Doric in style. At right of that a
sort of tower; at left a lower tower; again at the
left a hut in slight logs. Except the hut, everything
is in white stucco, sufficiently like marble. The Doric
temple has a line of terra-cotta color just over the
columns, and down that body run perpendicular lines
of green at intervals; otherwise all is white against
the green of the natural scene. Through this green
wooded background the Alps themselves loomed
hugely, and even of the lake itself you could get
shimmery glimpses.

The occasion when everything seemed at its best
in this new and immensely interesting form of art
was a certain performance of Grillparzer's "Hero
and Leander." Grillparzer, it should be remarked,
went out of his way to entitle his play romantically,
thus: "Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen," but to
translate into any sort of English would but mislead
the reader away from the fact that the play deals
with the Hero and Leander legend. Grillparzer
left the legend pretty much as it was, introducing
merely a grim high priest who, having thought to
discover that his niece (Hero) lately vowed to per-
petual virginity and the gods, is being visited nocturn-
ally by Leander (who nightly swims the Hellespont
to reach her in her isolated tower), waits for a night

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 91

of storm and then extinguishes the light which burns
on Hero's tower to guide the coming lover. Without
the light the swimmer is lost; the sea brings up his
body at the tower's base; Hero, when she sees it,
perishes also; the curtain falls on the two corpses.

To us who are, after all, inexperienced in the grim-
mer sorts of tradegy and, outside of Shakespeare,
but seldom listeners to blank verse on the stage, it
was wonderful how keen the sense of drama was
throughout the piece. Until the concluding fatality,
which came with the proper Greek note of the in-
evitable, there were plenty of light spots in the per-
formance; humor was by no means absent. And,
always, there stirred almost amazed appreciation
of the excellent suitability of the piece to this open-
air method. The classic robes, mostly white, or
simple solid colors — purples and blues — shining
against the white temple and the green of nature;
the faint music sounding now and then from below
the hill, whence, also, the actors appeared and where
they disappeared — all conspired to make a set of
memorable pictures.

These pictures were, one might say, set in equally
memorable music. It was, as I recall, a somewhat
gray day (yet exceptional in that tearful Swiss Sum-
mer in that it passed without rain), but the green of
the whole nook under the huge chestnuts, the loom-
ing majesty of the Alps and the moving tragedy on
the grass before us all gained a magic musical accom-
paniment from the song of a nightingale that sang
incessantly throughout the play. Now and again the
bird was plainly visible, perched upon the topmost
swaying branch. It carolled there, a natural artist,

92 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

rejoicing perhaps that some of the ozone and light
in which it lived had now begun to enter the life of
other artists. Certainly nothing could well have been
more memorable than that nightingale singing for
the Grillparzer play given in the open air that day
in Switzerland.

It was notable more than once how admirably the
very lines of this play fitted the natural scene before
the spectator. The final cry of agony from Hero
rang out into the whole landscape; you might well
say that the Alps themselves furnished the acoustics
for this theater. From my description you will have
seen how few incidentals are introduced upon Nature
in these theaters. A temple which the actors them-
selves used instead of the "wings" of the routine
theater; a tower at right and one at left; a statue or
two to fit the necessities of the particular play, a
hut; otherwise simply the scene itself. Unity and
the elementary emotions — those were the essentials.
No change of scene or light. The old-time repeti-
tion of the three knocks, twice warned the spectators ;
in the next moment the players had come upon that
bit of Nature ; the play was on. So to the end, when
we waked from the grasp of Art (in Nature) and
gave our applause.

IN some of the literature upon this open-air move-
ment there are already discussions upon the acoustics,
the placing of the voice, on light and such other ques-
tions. There are already magazines published solely
in the interests of this movement. Some argue that
certain pieces (among them the Grillparzer play
just described) would gain by being played later in

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 93

the day, so that actual twilight would fall upon the
concluding tragedy. Such points should show you
the possibilities still undeveloped in this dramatic
form. Gordon Craig's theories of light upon our
artificial theaters, and even Max Reinhardt's cunning
use of them, seem small compared with such a large
affair as the best way of employing the natural light
of day or evening. Similarly there is a certain large-
ness about this whole enterprise that makes one fore-
see for it a healthy and influential future. It is a re-
volt against the too mechanical form of the indoor
theater; it is a voice against all that smacks of in-
doors. Indoor art of all sorts becomes eventually
an art of emasculation and sterility.

A public composed of snobs (who go to the opera
to see their names in the papers), actors who are
mere automatons and playwrights who are merely
carpenters are the result of indoor art. The open-
air theater is calculated to appeal to the real lovers
of dramatic art; hardly to those who look upon the
theater merely as a relief from business cares or
from ennui. To visit the open-air theaters it is
nearly always necessary to make a little excursion
into the country; the real intention and desire are
paramount in the spectator. As to the players, it is
contended that there will be for them much relief
in the absence of the artificial lights and of the con-
fined sense of the old-fashioned theater. Much, un-
doubtedly, still remains to be learned about the best
handling of the voice and gesture under these new
circumstances. But you may be sure that these Ger-
man artists, earnestly as they have now taken up this
new form of drama, will discover easily and thor-

94 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

oughly the finest and most effective details that it
needs.

Three years ago, in the Weigelpark, near Schon-
brunn, outside Vienna, there was made an interest-
ing experiment, which may now appositely be
recalled. Max Mell of Vienna had written a lit-
tle pantomime. Another artist had designed cos-
tumes. The players were mere students, but there
were introduced some dances by the Wiesenthal sis-
ters, who were later to become famous on the Euro-
pean Continent. Against the green of the park,
under the clear Summer sky, those delicate colored
costumes and those charmingly fantastic dances took
on an effectiveness that would never have been reached
within walls. Just such stuff might now well be tried
in the present development of the open-air theater.
Otto Julius Bierbaum himself wrote just such panto-
mimes; he, too, was a protagonist of the open-air
theater, just as he once was of the Ueberbrettl. You
will easily see the possibility, too, of an Isadora Dun-
can, a Marie Madeline, a Maud Allan, of a Russian
or Hungarian troup of dancers, against the wonder-
ful green magic of Nature.

IV

POETS, PAINTERS AND DANCERS.

ALL the arts touch, are links in one chain of
beauty. The picture drawn, just now, of dancers en-
hancing their beauty and their skill against the back-
ground of outdoors, swings me to the poetry and the
paint that dancers have called forth. By virtue of

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 95
T"

which they may live when neither eyes nor legs can
fascinate the world.

What, to-day, does one remember of Carmencita
more vivid than the Sargent picture in the Luxem-
bourg? In Zuloaga's "Spanish Dancers" the entire
type gains a permanence that neither the jeweled
sinuosities of an Otero, nor the nimble loveliness of
a Liane d'Eve can win. Nor are dancers alone in
this. Any art depending on the gesture or the voice
— which only photograph or phonograph can liter-
ally record — passes more quickly than the others.
The actor, the singer and the dancer enjoy the brief-
est fame. They live longer by what they inspired
in poetry and paint than by any ever so vast vogue
they may have enjoyed while alive.

Each visit to the New Pinakothek starts these re-
flections. Whether Von Lenbach's Bismarck was
greater than his Saharet, I wrote some pages back,
recurs to me each time I view those masterpieces.
And also, before his Saharet, I recall the most dismal
Good Friday in my life.

It was in Hamburg. I was marooned, bankrupt.
Through that grim veil of penitence nothing of en-
tertainment could possibly pierce; yet certain paint-
ings succeeded in making me forget the clangor of
the church bells. Not the bulbous beauties of Hans
Makart in the famous gallery; those were old stories.
No — simply the publicly exposed portraits of Saharet
the dancer, who was presently to visit the Alstertown.
Apparently every other portraitist in Germany had
painted her. Her vogue was already staled; it had
already lasted a decade ; and whether she was Aus-
tralian, American or only German, people no longer

96 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

cared. They knew, indeed, that she was amazingly
domestic — a grandmother, indeed, said the invidious
— but, Lord, how she could still dance ! Above all,
what memorable pictures had been painted of her I
In one who could inspire to such art so many eminent
painters there must indeed have been vital art of her
own and vivid beauty. This much is certain: the
portrait by Von Lenbach will take her to posterity
when music hall and mirror no longer record her
actual graces.

Will we remember longest La Loie Fuller, or the
posters Jules Cheret made of her? Will not Dudley
Hardy's poster for "The Gaiety Girl" live fully as
long as the piece itself? Impermanent as is the art of
the uaffiche," it still has more chance of long life
than the actual art it chronicles. Toulouse-Lautrec
gave us a poster of Yvette Guilbert that may survive
her, and Aubrey Beardsley framed Rejane in one of
his startling arrangements of black and white. Long
before the "Merry Widow" waltzed her way across
the worlds, Lehar's fellow-countryman, the Freiherr
von Recnicek, had given us a sketch of the Viennese
waltz which you need only compare with the operetta
to find the resemblance. Juan Cardona had given us
a charming picture of a Spanish dancer, and given us
this thought of hers: "I'd like to tour as a Spanish
dancer well enough, but — firstly, I'm too young;
secondly, I'm Spanish; and, lastly, I can really
dance!" Which, blithe opposite to the aforenamed
canvas by Zuloaga, helps to keep vivid the type when
its impersonators are no more.

Let us applaud Isadora Duncan as much as we like ;
let us give solemn ear to all the noble lessons she

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 97

would teach with her toes ; but let us not imagine that
she, her pupils or her theories will live as long as the
portrait F. A. von Kaulbach painted of her in Munich
in 1902.

Even Adeline Genee has been caught for the fu-
ture; there are two chapters on her in a book of A.
B. Walkley's; imperishable as her art seems now,
she is the safer that she lives in literature. I have
seen no great portrait of her. As for the daughter
of Herodias, not only literature, through Wilde, but
music, through Richard Strauss and others, have
made her dancing immortal.

And poetry . . . Do you recall, I wonder, the
case of Mile. Madeleine? Munich, once again,
gives me this memory.

Madeleine's specialty was dancing while in a
trance.

At any rate, as in the story of Pharoah's daughter,
"that's what she said." Whether the scientists made
use of her performances to add to the hypnotic lore
at disposal of Dr. Charcot and his fellows, or
whether for her story there was no more basis in
fact than there may have been for Du Maurier's
"Trilby," is no great matter; the fact remains that
she aroused, by her "hypnotic dancing," a veritable
Madeleine epidemic throughout Germany. The
case is one more proof of the danger of thinking
there is no philosophy in a paradox; here, once again,
was Wilde's assertion that Nature copies Art made
manifest, since the story of "Trilby" considerably
antedated the appearance of this dancer.

The one, you will recall, could sing only while un-
der the influence of Svengali ; this dancer could dance

9 8 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

only while in a hypnotic trance. She, too, like Dun-
can, danced stories, philosophies, poems and history.
Like the music of Richard Strauss, which a little later
was to pretend to express philosophies and tragedies
in tone, so these dances exhibited all the other arts.
Learned persons were invited upon the platform to
pinch Mile. Madeleine's calves and convince them-
selves of her unconscious state in every possible way;
whether they went away believing or doubting, the
public was sure of this at least, that this young per-
son was extremely good to look upon, and that she
danced divinely.

The public, I repeat, and even the poets, used that
phrase; if we are more logically inclined, we would
avoid it, since none of us ever saw an actual divinity
dance. But let us return to the poets. They sang
of her for at least one Summer — and that, for poets,
is long faithfulness. Let me, in merest hints, recall
to you what one Munich poet, A. De Nora, expended
on this subject, while he used for his title without
other addition, "Madeleine." The bravest, most
prosaic hint of what was in his song will expose the
fervor of his singing; and he was typical of all the
rest.

"Is she in dreams?" he asked, "Or is the dream
in her? Are all these dreams simply her body's
music? Her body but her dreams turned music?
. . . I do not know. I only see before me in the
garishly reflected light this living, lovely, voiceless
riddle weaving — swaying — stooping — rising — and
every tone's hardly completed trance trembling upon
her pallid face, like faintest spoor on virgin snow.
Now like the weasel's stealthy steps; now with the

MODERNITY, PAINT, CARNIVAL 99

majesty of deer that go to pools — now dimly like the
shadows thrown by pigeon wings, now awful, like
the rising of the mighty wings of Death. ... So,
drawn by music's lure, the closely serried crowd of
passions pass from out her secret soul, over her
bod's marble steps, to the temple of her face.
And that, indeed, is beautiful ! As false, perhaps, as
she is fair? Perhaps only for cunning's sake, to hide
her conscious careful art, she wears this azure cloak
of dreams? What matter, and who cares? Is not
the soul of every woman like a Sphinx, that sits and
smiles upon the verge of the intangible, and gives us
riddles none can solve?"

You will see from this slight paraphrase of mine
to what enthusiasm the younger German poets rose
in such case. Whether or not this dancer was a great
artist or not is not my point; it is the stimulus such
dancing as this gave to the other arts that I am in-
sisting on.

Poetry, paint, the theater and the dance have been
shown inextricably interwoven, but Munich has long
had more than that to show. Impossible to discuss
Munich and dancing without touching on Lola Mon-
tez. She danced not only drama and philosophy for
us, but history. She takes us back, not six or ten
years, but sixty. We think these young women, who
dance history and philosophy and poetry for us, are
doing something new. By no means; in 1847 there
appeared in Leipsic a caricature of Lola Montez
with this caption: "Lola Montez Dances Bavarian
History." You see how we repeat the fads and
vogues not only of other years and other centuries !
I dare say the Greeks and Romans had their dancers,

ioo VAGABOND JOURNEYS

too, whose press agents pretended their like had
never been before. Lola Montez danced her way
to royal favor with her El Ole, and from that time
those active feet of hers did literally lead Bavarian
history a dance. And there, precisely — through the
history written about her and the cartoons devoted
to her — she secured for herself a renown that greater
dancers have missed.

Poetry, the theater, the dance, history and — we
are back to paint again. A very debauch of the arts,
always, for even the most barbaric, outdoor person in
Munich. All the senses, eventually to say nothing of
one's shoes, wear to shreds in such debauch. The
floors and walls of galleries, innumerable miles of
them, leave us mere remnants for the ministering
mercies of cobbler and oculist. Let us tell the motor-
man to steer us away — any whither, anywhere there
are no pictures, no statues — anywhere, in short,
where we can undergo a Kur. The Germans take a
Kur for everything else ; let us take one for art.

CHAPTER FIVE

A TYPICAL CURE RESORT

HAPPILY enough, perhaps, the average
American does not yet know the Euro-
pean "cure." Yet, if the national dis-
eases of nerves, dyspepsia and whatever
others there may be, spread presently from the well-
to-do to the plain citizen, it will not be long before
what is now as much an excuse for travel as a real
search for health becomes a truly national necessity.
To-day the American trend toward the fashionable
European Kur-Ort is still in the amateur stage, de-
spite the mere numbers of those who go. The
Americans, that is, have not yet reached — one need
not hope that they ever reach ! — the matter-of-course
attitude with which the good average German citizen
runs all the winter long straight in the face of all
sensible rules of diet and health, saying all the while :
"After all, it is for this one makes one's little cure in
the summer." He knows the penalty, and he cheer-
fully looks toward it. It is a question whether he
enjoys more the winter in which he outrages nature,
or the summer in which he allows nature to bring him
back to health. For, of course, the "cure" is little
but a return to nature's laws.

You are not to suppose, moreover, that the shrewd
German, Swiss, Italian and French innkeepers, doc-
tors and other professional aids to human comfort

101

102 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

and health neglect the winter time. By no means.
If in summer the health-seekers throng Marienbad,
Carlsbad, Kissingen, Nauheim, Schwalbach, Wies-
baden, Baden Baden, Pyrmont, Spa, Aix, Salsomag-
giore, Bagni di Lucca or any of the other constantly
discoverable resorts of middle Europe, in winter an-
other throng fills Davos, St. Moritz, Adelboden,
Meran and the almost countless winter resorts of the
Swiss, the Italian, the French or the Bavarian moun-
tains. Some cure nerves, some cure care; all are cur-
ing in one way or another ills brought on by living
too far from nature. Summer and winter the cures
flourish. All winter long inns keep open that once
had to harvest in a few short summer months.

If Americans have not yet reached the for-granted
attitude of the Germans toward the "cure," it is be-
cause, as has been said, they are still comparatively
beginners. It is only of recent years that the national
nerves have begun to collapse.

IN trying to give you a picture from the outside
of life at a characteristic European Kur-Ort, I am
not declaring ignorance of the existence of plenty of
such curative resorts on our own side of the water.
That is not the point at the moment; nor is it the
moment's question whether actual lack of health or
simply a desire to seem fashionable drives most
Americans to the cures abroad. Let us leave causes,
and be content with facts. There they are, those
cure places, on the other side, and there, each sum-
mer and each winter, you will find more and more
Americans. The life in such a place, viewed humor-
ously and intimately, is full of color and charm and

A TYPICAL CURE RESORT 103

such irony as those who are consciously "making the
cure" cannot possibly see. To appreciate those iron-
ies properly, you must be a casual observer, not a
victim seeking the cure itself.

It happens that a childhood of being dragged from
one of the older European cure-resorts to an-
other familiarized the writer with the characteristics
of the most typical in that sort. The names do not
matter much; in one generation this is fashionable,
in another that. We know, for instance, that it was
in Ems, then fashionable, that the word was given
by the then king of Prussia which resulted in the
building of the present German empire. The second
German emperor was also fond of Ems; but to-day
it has returned sheerly to its curative virtues; only
Germans and Russians and French are seen there;
it has no fashionable or royal attractions for the
Americans, who are beginning to play with Kur-Orts
as with a new toy. I was there last year for the first
time since childhood, and I heard not one American
voice. The humor of which is — had I not said this
subject was full of trapdoors? — that Ems is exactly
a cure for the American voice. But — it is not my in-
tention to name names; I am merely emphasizing
how fashions change in cures, as in all else. Once,
too, Teplitz, in Bohemia, was as frequented as any
of the other places where warm waters gush forth
for humanity's benefit; to-day you will wait long be-
fore you see a Teplitz label on an American trunk.

A typical place does not need to be identified for
my present purpose. It is a German one, of course;
for, after all, though we know that Italy and France
and Belgium are full of rival resorts, it is in the Ger-

104 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

man countries that the "cure" as a real part and par-
cel of civilized life has been brought to its greatest
perfection. It is the Germans who lift eyebrows
when a family declares that it is not going to a cure
that summer; it is the Germans who have system-
atized the Kur-Ort until it is a distinct realm of its
own.

Whether it is a resort for the cure of nerves, of
fat, or liver, of gout, or of what not, the essential
procedure differs but slightly. In some places there
is an actual air of strict adherence to a medical rou-
tine ; in others a frank admission that it is entertain-
ment the visiting population is after. Let us sketch
a medium specimen.

In such a Kur-Ort the life is characteristic both of
cures and of cosmopolis. That is, indeed, the note
of the more frequented of these places. There lies,
perhaps, much of the charm that brings the visitors
from the ends of the earth. If the underlying tone
of all is German, the note of Russian, of Dutch, and
American speech is often as prominent. You can
spend long days playing with the problems of exter-
nals and the nationalities they cover. A student of
facial types need never tire of employment for his
wits in such a place. Nor the student of manners
and customs. Here is cosmopolis in little.

They tell us about this or that great corner on this
or that great metropolitan thoroughfare of human
traffic. That if you will watch long enough, you will
see all that's worth while in the world from such a
corner. Well, you can say much the same of the
characteristic Kur-Ort. The one I have in mind, for
instance, combines curative properties with an actual

A TYPICAL CURE RESORT 105

entertaining life of its own as a town, as a center of
entertainment and civic activity. The observer is
not forced to witness merely a somewhat saddening
procession of invalids. The actual invalids are so
mingled into the seekers after rest or entertainment
or fashionable fellowship that the total picture still
has color and humor. It is true there are plenty of
the lame, the halt and the blind, plenty of processions
of the spectacled and the crutched. In one region
might be found the greatest eye specialist in Europe,
or at any rate his nephew; the English visitors who
believed in his fame did not stop to inquire into those
particulars. In another district was the greatest man
on nerves, and so on down the whole list of ailments.
But you did not have to see those features to the ex-
clusion of the more humorous details.

For it was surely humorous to note early in the
morning at an hour when in England, in Russia, in
Holland and in America they would not have risen
for hours the fashionable and the feeble taking their
little glasses and their tubes and going to the springs
to gurgle warm water slowly and walk slowly about
and listen to the band. Solemnly, as doing a great
duty not only to themselves, but all humanity, they
trod their gentle measures with a sort of military,
not to say medical, precision. Or do we wrong them
by imputing to them a concern for the human mass?
Perhaps; on second thought, there is none so egotisti-
cally selfish as the true cure-guest. Were you to dis-
turb, for instance, by a look, a word, a touch, the
even stateliness of his tread while sipping water from
his glass, there is no telling what annihilation he
might not hurl at you. The band plays its specified

io6 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

hour; the cure-folk sip and stroll; the ladies' cos-
tumes are not yet elaborated for fashionable com-
parisons, since — let us whisper it — some of them are
about to go to bed again. Why not? In the proper
cure resort they always bring the coffee and the rolls
to a properly paying guest's room. Comes, then, an
hour or so when cosmopolis is not visible. It is
sleeping, breakfasting, bathing in the curative waters,
seeing its doctor.

If you will do no more than sit on one of the
benches in the public gardens, or in the rooms of the
Kur-Haus, or before the portico of such an inn as
the Four Seasons, in Wiesbaden, one of the most de-
lightful in Europe, you will see and hear the world
awaking for its public appearance. Cabs come and
go. If it is the high season for fashion — every
resort has its high pinnacle of fashionableness, and
some of the larger places have two high seasons in
the year — you will see so many royalties and hear so
much elaborate courtesy that you will never again be
much stirred by the magnificence of our most con-
spicuous plutocrats. In the cure itself, however, all
men, even Americans, are equal. Princes of the
blood or princelings of the sinister, plutocrats of
Holland or New Amsterdam, good burgesses from
Rixdorf or from Salem, heavy guardsmen from Pic-
cadilly or from Potsdam — all are equal before the
cure regime. You take a glass of water at seven,
and you walk so many miles ; you take a warm bath at
ninety-something (more likely at twenty-something
Reaumur) ; you eat just this or that; in the afternoon
you drink more water and listen to more music; you

A TYPICAL CURE RESORT 107

do all this exactly and faithfully, or you are a mere
fashionable flaneur and have not come for the cure.
To sit aside, to drink the water simply because it
seems harmless, to take one of those baths now and
again because they cleanse and to enjoy the constant
music is pleasant, but it can also be dangerous, as I
must point out later. For the present let us enjoy
the pleasant spectacle from the outside. At noon
there is the first procession for the benefit of all with
eyes to see. The nationalities mingle, their clothes
and their speech parade under the accurately trimmed
chestnut trees; fountains play in the sunshine, and
Russian music swings in from the park. You need
not, in that fashionable mob, discern disease; there
are wheeled chairs here and there, or other such
evidences, but the gaiety of the scene is dominant.
The scene repeats itself again at the hour of coffee,
between four and five; the music plays again in the
gardens of the Kur-Haus, and again the world and
his wife strolls up and down over the gravel. At
night, in fine weather, again the music, outdoors, and
sometimes wonderfully effective fireworks over foun-
tains and trees. You have to admit that these Ger-
mans do their cure-business well. They do not, in the
main, give you gambling, as some other nations do,
but they give you good music, good plays and well-
staged opera. In the resort I have in mind, for in-
stance, you had all the entertainment an American
metropolis could give you. The picture was more
intimate, all was closer together, you could study
your neighbors more effectively; that was the chief
difference.

io8 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

AMERICANS, in such a place as Wiesbaden, it is
to be remarked, do not loom large. They have not
yet discovered the solidity of its fashionableness, if
we may call it so. Emperors go there, and with les-
ser dignitaries the halls and streets simply swarm;
but no especial appeal is made for the American cus-
tom. Yet it is, for all that, more characteristic of
the real Kur-Ort than many of the places where
Americans go largely in order to impress other
Americans. Our country people, discovered under
these conditions as only a slight feature of the total,
loom but faintly against the Russians and the Dutch.

The faring forth abroad of the well-to-do Dutch
is comparatively a new thing. Not so with the Rus-
sians. I recall boyhood days in Schwalbach, where
even then the Russians were in evidence ; they, with the
English, had then the greatest habit of travel. We all
know that the Russian is greatly in evidence in Paris
and the lesser pleasure places; but there are few
places anywhere in Europe where he is not seeking
either distraction or health. He or she; whether it
is the incalculable melancholy of the Russian country
that drives its men and its women away so much, we
cannot say here, but it is a fact that you will never
realize anything of the Russian type, whether in
brutality or beauty, until you have lived, rather than
sampled, the life of this or that European cure resort.
In many places the Russians loom so large that
concerts of strictly Russian music are given no less
than once a week throughout the season.

You grow, eventually, callous to all the magnifi-
cences and personages. A genial old Russian bear
and I used to engage several times a day upon a per-

A TYPICAL CURE RESORT 109

formance in front of the most staid inn the town
afforded; that will show you how irreverently one
becomes inured to human greatness. The moment
the one of us caught sight of the other, at twenty,
thirty, forty paces — no matter how far off — each
stopped, clicked heels together, lifted hat from head
in most elaborate swing, bowed slowly forward and,
approaching, cried as with one accord, uGood morn-
ing, Excellenz 1" I am sure there was not a soul that
watched who was not convinced that we were not,
indeed, as great Excellencies as any of them. Why,
when titles and dignities fly about as freely as in
America such titles as captain, or colonel, or major,
or simply the good old "Say" I should one not take
one and play with it a little ? My friend, the Russian,
began it; he said it was useless for me to deny it: I
looked like an Excellenz, and that settled it. From
that day we played our comedy with due solemnity.
If he told me, that fine old Russian, much of Peters-
burg and Moscow, he also proved to me that the
Russians have humor as well as melancholy.

OF humor, and of melancholy, is such a Kur-Ort
full. I have hinted, in these last pages, of an under-
lying danger in noting, from a safe aloofness, the
cures of others. For, once upon a time I employed
a summer in such observation, in a resort where peo-
ple left so much gout and rheumatism that I, until
then immune from either ailment, felt for the first
time in my life a heritage of uric acid. One man's
meat, and so on. What cured the others undid me.
There was humor, there was melancholy, indeed!

But the humor must prevail. What we must feel

no VAGABOND JOURNEYS

is that, having "made our cure," we have done our
duty. Having drunk too deep of life, or of art, hav-
ing had the world, in flesh and blood or in paint and
mask, too much with us, we have now purged body
and soul in the cure. We are washed sweet again.
We can face again the world, the flesh and the devil.
And what does that spell, if not Paris?

CHAPTER SIX

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES: PARIS

I
HER FIRST INVITATION

AT last, then, in the dear city of delight,
Paris. Paris — with its thousand and one
fair memories, its throng of paint and
marble ghosts, its vistas of historic riot,
of yesterdays that ran with blood, and to-morrows
pale with absinthe ! Paris, with its myriad enchant-
ments of art and femininity; Paris, the queen of
courtesans among cities!

Some such vague ecstasy comes over all of us who
visit or revisit this dream-city of one's artistic spirit.
Whether one come to it after long absence, or for the
first time, the effect is much the same. The more if
the interval of youth has seen one steeped in at-
tempts to fathom the uslim gilt soul" of Paris as that
soul breathes through the arts. If one has sung the
chansons of Verlaine to fit one's mournful, youthful
moods; has laughed with Forain and Caran d'Ache;
has seen the boulevards and brasseries through the
eyes and the pencils of Steinlen and Willette; has
watched the disheveled riot of the music-halls by way
of Jules Cheret and Toulouse-Lautrec; has searched
for the heart of things French through the grim

ill

ii2 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

bronze of Rodin, the spiced prose of Prevost, the
irony of Octave Mirbeau, and the jasmined poison
of Catulle Mendes — is it any wonder that the actual
sight and feel of Paris start a thrill that has all the
ecstasy of dream? Every artistic and romantic
fiber responds to the mere thought that it is, once
more, the Parisian air one breathes, the Parisian
streets one walks, and the Parisian women one moves
among.

IF one is given to the ecstatic, in so champagne-
like an atmosphere as that of Paris, it is as well to
prepare for trouble. Should opportunity and coin-
cidence contrive together to foment more ecstasies,
there is no knowing what might not happen.

We, at any rate, Tom Vingtoin and I, were, in the
beginning of the episode that recurs to me whenever
I think of Paris, quite innocent of impending dis-
aster. We were sitting quite peaceably at a little
table outside the Cafe de la Paix, opposite the Opera.
No need, surely, to introduce to you Vingtoin;
among the men in the younger movements of art,
especially as concerns interpretation of Gallic art
for English reading, no man should be better known.
1 found him as delightful as ever. He was grown a
trifle stout, but his lovely Scots-Parisian accent was
as fascinating as of yore, and his monocle was un-
dimmed. You may imagine, when one has spilt Eng-
lish ink together side by side, and has even concocted
independent theaters for the reformation of New
York, that one may have, meeting thus after many
years, much to say to each other.

Besides, Vingtoin has an exquisite taste in Pernot

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 113

blanche. The waiter piled the little platters on the
table ; they began to assume quite a disreputable
height, telling the tale of our thirst and our conversa-
tional ardor.

The staccato notes of Paris and the boulevard fell
upon us, the insanely futile cracking of the cabmen's
whips, the grinding and squeaking of the 'bus brakes,
like souls in pain, the reek and thump of the motor-
cars, the shouts of the newspaper sellers, the twang
of the many Americans, the chatter of milliners'
girls. We talked on and on, and our interest in the
past and the present and the future grew as the Per-
not blanche dipped toward us.

"My dear boy," said Vingtoin, "we shall have
great times! We shall sit where Verlaine sat, and I
will point out to you where he hung his pipe. Ah,
the poor old man ! You shall take a look in the cafe
where the Reading gaolbird dropped his bloated
paunch and ogled the throng. We will go to Rodin's
studio together; — we will — "

"But first you will come to dinner with me?"

"Ah, no! I'm terribly sorry, but, in the first
place, I have three thousand words to write to-night,
and in the next, my wife is expecting me in Belle vue;
you see we live half an hour out. Another day I
shall be delighted." And he launched forth again
into plans for the immediate. We were to wheel
together into the suburbs and the countryside; Ver-
sailles, St. Cloud and many another place was to find
us awheel together. But he could not dine with me.
Well, it was a great pity, but — who was I to coax him
from work and duty. Far be it . . .

The motor-cars went by with their teuf, teuf —

ii4 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

most abominable of noises. An ancient went by
twanging his newspaper shout, "La Presse" "Le
Frangais," and the infinite drawl of that "presse" I
cannot make plain to you unless you have heard it
yourself. Another ancient followed, very staccato,
with "Paris, Sport — Complet," to get the full effect
of which you must attempt something like this,
"Paree — spore — complay!" Inwardly I shriek with
laughter at the Parisian version of our good word
"sport," but Vingtoin is now too Parisian to note the
grotesquerie. He is asking me about all the other
musketeers of the time when we went smashing wind-
mills together in America.

"Charley is at the old grind. He is always
threatening to come here. But I believe he will never
come. Nelson translates, and writes plays, and
translates. Gaffers still shouts for purity in the
theater. They are all prosperous. So are you. All
but I."

"You, you scamp ! I believe you are a millionaire
in disguise. We others grind for the magazines and
syndicates; you manage to write books. You are
heard of in strange places masquerading in blue gog-
gles and a linen duster, you — bah ! you are something
mysterious, I believe, a ward in Chancery or the
like!"

"I am content with health, if that's what you mean,
while you others fight for fame. I am pot>r, but in
Paris; will you dine with me?"

"My dear boy, I can't; I really can't!"

"Too bad ! Well — Ah, by the way, we forgot one
man of the old crew. How's Dutot? Here, I
know, and flourishing, but do you see much of him?"

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 115

Dutot was the one who had been a sort of ring-
leader of our young nihilism in New York art and
letters. He was a Frenchman, and was now once
more on his native soil, prosperous and inventive as
ever. He has the theater upon the brain, and makes
his salt by inventions for the yellow newspapers.
Vingtoin and I began recounting the legends of
Dutot. I interrupted with the request, more urgent
than before, that Vingtoin dine with me. The Per-
not blanche was milkier than ever. Vingtoin was
chiming again his, "My boy, if I did not have three
thousand words to write!" . . . when I beheld a
figure approaching up the rue Auber, approaching
and becoming more and more unmistakable. "As I
live, it is Dutot!"

It was. We had not, we three musketeers, been
together for many years. The platters telling the
tale of the Pernot blanches grew gaily in number.
Paris was ringing in our veins; Paris, and memories
of the land beyond seas, of New York and New Or-
leans and St. Louis.

"But," said I, "it is time we dined." I refused to
hear Vingtoin's mumbling about "three thousand
words." I reminded them both that Madame was
still hungry and weary from the journey. We must
join her and all dine. Vingtoin's murmur faded; he
and his monocle remained. In a few moments we
had haled forth Madame, and she was in the babble
of names, and songs, and laughter that our remi-
niscences resounded with. She is, thank fate, humor-
ously used to it. To hear her say the names of "Paul
Verlai-ne, and Rosset-t-i, and Chappiell-6-h!" is to
go off into shrieks of laughter. She thinks us all

ii6 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

mildly insane, and she knows no more of art than to
be beautiful. For which I humbly thank my stars
many times a day. So, on this memorable day of our
debut in Paris, she fell admirably into the frolic.

The four of us bundled into a cab, the cabman
cracked his silly whip, and down the boulevard we
went toward the Madeleine. At the corners of the
rue Royale and the boulevards sit many Americans,
at Durand's and other places, who know no better.
But Dutot did. He led us to Lucas'. Many a time
thereafter we were to give the glad word to our
Jehu, "chez Lucas" and to dine in the open, with all
the gay and mournful come-and-go past the Made-
leine before us, but never again were we to have such
a dinner as this. What a dinner it was ! Also, the
Pernots blanches had built a terrific appetite.

There was, I think, a crayfish soup. There was
duck, and there was a Macedoine of fruit, and a good
deal of honest good wine, yclept ordinary. But the
bare names of these things do not tell of the delights
of that dinner. It was the perfect cooking, the per-
fect gaiety that made it a unique occasion, and though
in other places we were to sample many other epicu-
rean delights, the utter zest of that dinner remains
a sweet morsel upon the mind.

Vingtoin had ceased mentioning the three thousand
words. His monocle was more rigid than ever.
Dutot grew more and more inventive. When our
thoughts approached coffee he invented our exodus
from Lucas'. "We will go," said he, "to Maxim's."
It is only two blocks, but I think we took a cab. I
am a little hazy about the cabs. The others cannot
verify any better than I can. But I know we got to

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 117

Maxim's. "The Girl from Maxim's" had not yet
arrived; it was too early in the evening for her. She
turns up a little before midnight and lines the inside
of Maxim's with her elegance and her cocottish type
of good looks. She makes a sort of wallpaper for
Maxim's; into the rooms so papered Americans walk
with an almost admirable docility. Maxim's is not
yet so utterly empty of real Parisians as is the Moulin
Rouge, but it is getting there. Its vice is, of course,
very expensive, and it is not so obvious as the vice of
the Moulin Rouge; besides, it is a place where, after
a certain hour, the American girl does not often
enter. So the American youth makes hay there.

The stars were in the heavens, the coffee in our
cups, and the Pernot blanche taking counsel with the
good red wine. The result of this counsel was that
we must all go cabward once more. It may have
been the same cab. It may have been another. I do
not remember. It does not matter. All cabs in
Paris are noisy as to whip, reckless as to career and
cheap as to price, — unless you use them as Dutot and
Vingtoin did that morning. But hold — it was not
morning yet. Over the Place de la Concorde we
drove. Vingtoin was grown romantic. "There
Marie Antoinette was beheaded," said he, pointing,
"and there Louis !" and he pointed. And which was
Louis' esteemed number I did not hear, or care, for
the night was too fine to think of murders and sud-
den death. But Vingtoin raved all the way up the
Champs-Elysees; he raved of the historic delights of
his Paris, of the emotions this stone and that street
gave him; he raved past the glittering, will-o'-the-
wisp lights among the trees, the Marigny, the Jardin

n8 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

de Paris, the Alcazar d'Ete; he raved romantically
and eloquently, the while I listened and wondered
what the Macedoine was made of, and what a beauti-
ful benefaction was the making of Pernot blanche.
While Vingtoin raved Dutot chaffed the cabman.
But we got to the Elysee Palace in good order. For
it was here we were to have more coffee and cognac.
This was to be Turkish coffee. Therefore, being
seated on the glittering lounge, Dutot hailed the
oriental henchman fiercely. Elaborately dressed
diners sat about talking English and all the other
languages; we were not elaborately dressed, but we
were elaborately gay, and we cheered Dutot on.

"Avance-toi id" quoth Dutot, and the grinning
darky came up to the very edge of the table. Where-
upon, for Dutot's benefit, he had to give a specimen
of every language he knew, — and he seemed to know
them nearly all.

By this time Vingtoin and Dutot had struck up a
duet, having for its object my permanent residence
in Paris. They assured me that my fortune, if I
stayed, was as good as made. Their argument, in
cold statistics, was not much more exact than if I were
to assert, as a piece of stirring news, the fact that
God feeds the sparrows. But they assured me, with
complete accord, that I could live beautifully, work
but three hours a day and enjoy the delights of their
society into the bargain. Taking me aside, Dutot
assured me that he knew, he absolutely knew, I could
make as much as Vingtoin was making. But, I told
him, Vingtoin has the language perfectly.

"Bah!" said Dutot, "he doesn't speak French any
better than you do !"

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 119

I have thought about that remark a good deal. I
can't help thinking there is a slight in it, either for
Vingtoin or for me. Or is it for both of us? But I
forget; you have never heard my French. . . .

The next moment Vingtoin had drawn me aside.
He vowed that if Dutot could make a living in Paris,
I could. He cited a great many figures and facts.

Yet my foolish modesty prevented my admitting
the belief that I could possibly be as prosperous in
Paris as these two. It did not seem even hazily pos-
sible. But, after all, I don't know; before the morn-
ing was finished one of them borrowed money of me.
Wild horses will not make me tell which one it was.
But the relief that act was to my self-respect was
worth twice the price.

This time it was, I know, the identical cab that we
bundled into, having imbibed our thick Turkish coffee
and sufficiently deviled the servitor. What our route
was I shall never be able to say, but I know where
we got to, because Dutot chanted the name all the
way, in such time as he was not assuring the cabman
that he could drive much better than himself. It was
"chez Barratte" that we were bound for, and it was
the onion soup we were after. Barratte's is near the
Central Markets, and early in the morning fashion-
able folk come a slumming thither for the lovely
soup, much as in New Orleans one went to old
Mother Whatshername — Begue — for her wonderful
buzzard's breath soup. We were too early for the
fashionable folk, and had the place almost to our-
selves, and the soup was glorious, despite Madame's
remarks to the contrary.

But Dutot was not content. He cried aloud for

120 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

"Al-fred!" with all the accent on the fred. At last
Alfred appeared, ancient and smiling, an ancient
waiter, as fine a type as you may rarely see. When
Dutot was a student Alfred had served him, had fed
him, had loaned him money, wherefore now one must
not forget Alfred. Alfred was reputed well off; his
son was a doctor with a fashionable practice; but
Alfred continued to be, as all his life, chez Barratte.
We drank Alfred's health in more red wine, and
Dutot embraced Alfred. It was very affecting.

Vingtoin, meanwhile, grew more eloquent behind
his monocle. We were all to do Paris together. Not
the Baedeker things ; no, the corners you could not put
into guide-books, the associations only intimacy and
personality could make dear. Some of the regula-
tion things, perhaps, but even these from the view-
point of the insider, not the outsider. The Bal
Bullier, the Red Mill, the Quarter, Montmartre,
the cabarets of heaven and hell, the brasseries
of the boulevards — all these Vingtoin was to usher
us into.

Well, we did all of these things and many more;
we dined at the Dead Rat, and we scaled the Boul
Miche to the Bullier; we browsed along the street
of the Old Pigeon and the street of Mr. the Prince;
we sampled the books of the Quay Voltaire and the
Odeon; we dined on all the sanded floors of the
Boulevard Montmartre, and we went, at dawn, along
the streets of the Fourth of September and the Little
Fields to see the Markets in their fruity glory — but
not with Vingtoin, not with Vingtoin.

No ; not with Vingtoin. Many things were to hap-
pen to Vingtoin, and to Dutot, but not the things that

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 121

they intended to have happen. Man proposes and
Pernot blanche confuses.

It is fortunate Madame and I were worn out by
our journey early in the day. Or there is no knowing
what might not have befallen us. As it was, after
Vingtoin had succeeded in preventing Dutot from
driving the cab, we steered for our hotel, and there,
with explicit plans for the morrow, parted. On the
morrow I was to go wheeling with Vingtoin. I re-
member it as if it were yesterday.

And that is the last I saw of Vingtoin.

DEAR me, I wonder if he ever got his three thou-
sand words written, and if he went wheeling! Not
with me, he didn't, I know. And from what I was
able to gather of the subsequent proceedings I think
neither Vingtoin nor Dutot were doing anything at
all on the morrow. The facts came to me in frag-
ments, but the fragments are enough to assure me
that it was a very large morning for our section of
America in Paris. Had I mentioned that all this hap-
pened on the night between the 3rd and 4th of July?
Ah, me, these American Fourths in Paris! Ask
Vingtoin and Dutot, if you doubt me.

From the fragments, then, I know this much : they
went back to Maxim's. There Dutot asserted his
tact by renewing acquaintance with a waiter at whom
he had once thrown a plate. Thence, somehow,
vaguely, mistily, they got to Suresnes and to Ver-
sailles. In one place Vingtoin insisted on buying a
straw hat for the cab horse; in another they bor-
rowed money; in another Dutot slept for hours in the
cab, while Vingtoin mingled with liquors.

122 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

The valley of the Seine reeks, I think, with the
marks of that morning's cab ride. When Dutot was
brought finally home, he made the cabman a present
of some rabbits for the cabman's children. The
mere fag-end of the cab bill was fifty francs. The
total bill, like the remarks made by the Dutot and
Vingtoin spouses, when their husbands arrived in the
glare of noonday, their sins and their potations heavy
upon them, I refuse to chronicle.

But, oh, how I would like to know the exact move-
ments of those two after they left us! I can still
hear Vingtoin's refrains, first of the three thousand
words he had to write, and then of the wheel ride we
were to take together ; I can still hear Dutot shouting
for "Alfred"; and the whole night is as if it were
yesterday. But I shall never know just what hap-
pened. No one will ever know. For I have never
seen them again. I hope they are both alive. I
should be sorry to think otherwise. They were go-
ing to show me Paris, but that is a minor detail.
What I want to know is, did Vingtoin write his three
thousand words?

But, whether he did or not, whether he and Dutot
showed us Paris or not, they had done one thing
completely, perfectly:

They had assisted most nobly at a Parisian debut.

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 123
II

THE SHATTERING OF A LEGEND

DAWN brings hope more often than does sunset,
which, for most of us, only gilds regret. Youth
makes a monomania of enthusiasm; experience
brings the senses into proportion. Hardly one of us
for whom Paris has not meant, at one time, part of
youth, only to take on, afterward, the lines of some-
what haggard age. The dreams and the legends
were lovely; let us never regret the gay moments in
which we helped to lift up those dreams and legends,
made them come true because we wished it so; but —
let us admit also that we have not altogether escaped
the tawdry truth that sometimes lurked behind the
legend. Once the halo of romance takes to thin air,
and — behold the paint cracking, the perfume reeking
stale as spent liquor, and the Actual making ugly
faces at us. How many, many dreams and legends
youth and Paris have conspired to build!

The legend, for example, of Maxim's. How mad
and glad and bad it was, and oh, how it was false!

"Maxim's!" The name evoked, according as
you were young or old, keen for pleasure or sated
with it, the most glittering anticipations or the most
roseate recollections. One never is, however, so
much as one is to be, or has been blessed — in this
case, as in so many others. The golden haze of pros-
pective or perspective filmed inevitably our picture
of the place that so demurely sits beneath the Made-
leine and in sight of where Marie Antoinette lost her
head forever as composedly as now the ladies of

124 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Maxim's fix their complexions for the night. Of all
spots in the world of pleasure, this one seemed most
alloyed with legend, most enveiled in play and story.
Of all such spots, it was the hardest to distinguish
in its actual form from the lovely dream of it that
purveyors of play and fiction, that viveurs in their
anecdotage and striplings in their legend-tinted hopes,
have spun. The past and the future glorify Maxim's,
even as Paris herself is glorified in memory and in
approach; artists in paint, in words and in drama
conspire to color it with rose and gold; what is ob-
scure is the actual, the present — the real Maxim's, as
you and I, mes amis, know it in the moments when
we permit the actual to remain the actual, and our-
selves to retain that rarest of all visions, the normal.

The real Maxim's, is it indeed, seen soberly, seen
clearly, the splendid sensuous dream of all that haze
of memory, of play and story and picture that is
so definite a fraction of the modern primrose path?
Is it, indeed, the Maxim's of the song and of the
stage? ^ ,

Is it impertinent, is it unpleasant, to inquire, to go
behind the scenes? When the scenes themselves are
so lovely, why finger them to see if they are papier-
mache? Because, if you please, contrast is one of the
most interesting things in the world, for one thing;
and because, for another, there is hardly a more as-
tonishing instance in the world of to-day of how the
name of a small Parisian shopkeeper may become
advertised to all civilization without its owner having
ever, apparently, used a single one of the direct
methods of reclame. And because, finally, it may be
entertaining to consider a little the picture, the le-

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 125

gends and the songs that went to the making famous
of the Maxim dream.

Though it is nearly two decades since the thrifty
Parisian of the Rue Royale persuaded the author of
"La Dame de Chez Maxime" to advertise abroad
his cuisine's virtue and his customers' lack of it, that
farce marks, to all intents and purposes, the begin-
ning of the Maxim legend. Between that play and
"Die Lustige Witwe," our young century's most
popular operetta, there is a wealth of theatric use of
the resort we are now considering. If it was "Die
Lustige Witwe" coming from Vienna, which most
effectively impressed the legend of Maxim's de-
lights and Maxim's ladies — "of course," as Nish
has it, "when I say ladies . . . upon that sec-
tion of the world whose happiness is in the pursuit of
pleasure, it is not to be denied that Lehar's little
masterpiece had planty of forerunners in the way of
plays that pictured the aforesaid delights and the
aforesaid ladies. The life of the corks that pop, and
of the damsels whose faces are their fortunes, has
always had a certain attraction on the stage.
Whether it was the cork-room of Koster & Dial's, or
the cabinets of the "Poodle Dog" in "A Trip to
Chinatown," or the chambre separee of Schnitzler's
"Abschied's-Souper," or the bald suggestiveness of
a piece like "The Turtle," there has always been ap-
plause for these scenes. The "cabinet particulier"
of Paris becomes in Teuton usuage of the Parisian
tongue the chambre separee; but the article is the
same, and the picture of it on the stage can ever be
counted on to pleasantly affect the spectators. How
much more pleasant, then, the spectacle, upon the

126 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

stage, of a magnified, a multiplied cabinet — a very
heaven (or hell; you have your choice!) of cabi-
nets— like Maxim's!

Of the pieces entirely revolving upon the vogue
of the resort, the most frank originated in Berlin.
To see "Die Herren Von Maxim's" ("The Men of
Maxim's"), was to have one's notion of German
solidity in the theater roughly shocked. In that
revue of the Metropol-Theater was a plot based
upon a wager, made by the most conspicuous rasta-
quouere of the period, that in eighty days he would
accomplish a victory over eighty consecutive ladies.
"Of course, when I say ladies . . . vide

our friend Nish ! You may imagine the opportunity
this wager, made in Maxim's, by one of the fashion-
ables who frequented it, and about the fashionably
frail who compose its population, gave for spectacu-
lar song and scene upon the stage. Again, in "La
Duchesse des Folies Bergeres" — played in German
as "Herzogin Crevette" — we had a plot in which a
one-time star in the elysium of the Rue Royale had
married, but steals away to revisit — despite her hus-
band, her title, and all her responsibilities — the
glimpses of her less monogamous past. You may
conceive, even where you do not remember, the
gaiety of the young woman's return to the scene of
her triumphs, the delight of her former comrades in
amours as well as arms, and the perplexity that en-
sues when there is danger of her husband finding her
again, his wife, where once he had found her, before
he made her his wife.

We sighed almightily at these stories, once upon a
time, and pretended they were so French as to be

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 127

quite foreign to our understanding. We pretended
to forget that these things happen daily in our own
Puritan regions, only we have not the art of gilding
every detail in the episode as have our friends in
Paris. A millionaire of ours marries, and we know
where his wife comes from, and it is not as pretty a
place as even the real Maxim's; a great painter
paints her portrait, and we admire it, but we whisper;
she is left a widow and her millions bring another
husband from those who whispered; our world is the
same, in the whole and the half, as any other world,
whether we dim our vision with the Puritan mask or
not. Only we seem never to have the trick of giving
wickedness so fully the air of a polite game between
ladies and gentlemen as have our fellows across the
Atlantic.

It was when we compared the stage pictures of
Maxim's in the European performances of "The
Merry Widow" to those in the American production
that we most clearly saw that while we are able to
picture, theatrically, a place that may snare the
fancies of the unsophisticated who confuse sin with
noise, and vice with hilarity, we cannot yet reproduce
such scenes as, in the Viennese and London versions,
made this operetta one of the most potent and dan-
gerous fostering forces of the legend. While in our
American version of "Die Lustige Witwe" Maxim's
was painted sufficiently gay, and cheery, and un-
conventional, to suit the most obvious form of the
legend, it is not to this version that I would contrast
the real article. That contrast is not wide enough.
These ladies, after all — "and when I say ladies
. . . were somewhat nasally voiced, and a bit

128 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

loud, and there are men, of just the sort supposed to
support the legendary Maxim's, who would not find
them in the least fascinating, but only rather noisy.
As for the males — well, like so fatally many Ameri-
can stage creatures — they looked hardly gentlemen;
not even a "run" of six hundred nights enabled them
to wear their clothes as if either to the manner or to
Maxim's born.

No, it was abroad that one looked for the finest
flights of fancy on the point. We imported uThe
Merry Widow" two years after its birth in Vienna;
just as several years after their Opera Comique suc-
cesses we imported that essence of Paris itself that
Charpentier called "Louise," and that essence of an
earlier Paris that Pierre Louys and Camille Erlanger
called "Aphrodite"; but we lack the actors and
actresses to give all those essences their vitality. As
"Louise" is all Paris, the desire for it, the dream,
and the delusion, so the one final scene in "The
Merry Widow," as played in London and Vienna,
was all the Maxim dream and legend in its essence.
Here were the glitter of the lights, the waiters,
silent, fleet and without scruple; the musicians, gay
and garish; the swell mob of males, princes, poten-
tates, cosmopolites, men of every world, splendid in
black and white, insolent in their strength. And
here, before all else, are

Lo Lo, Dodo, Joujou,

Cloclo, Margot, Froufrou,
and all the others in that paradise where

"Surnames do not matter,

We take the first to hand."
These were girls whom by a minute change in

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 129

point of view any man might really take for ladies.
Merry, but beautiful. They were clothed most won-
drously, and they seemed most wondrous sweet.
Only a poet — who need not always be a gentleman !
— would insult one of these by declaring her
. . . fair in the fearless old fashion,
And thy limbs are as melodies yet,
And move to the music of passion . . .
or reminding us that

the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet.
As in the case of Rossetti's "Jenny," these damsels,
whose metier was supposed to be Maxim's, were so
delightful as to cause us to shudder when we think
how easily they might be young persons whose names
appear in the chronicles of fashion. Our cousin Nell,
fond of fun, and fond of love, and fond of change,
may so easily become like "Jenny," or like these "lit-
tle Paris ladies" of "The Merry Widow" ! The dif-
ference is so slight, so thin; that was just the danger
in these stage pictures of that place upon the Rue
Royale where the feminine frequenters nightly solve
the secret of nocturnal beauty. Where we see a
somewhat noisy, vulgar picture of the place, it has
for us, if we have aught of finer sensibilities, no
charm at all; but where the picture is alive with
lovely, merry, discreet beauties in perfect taste and
perfect gowns, and with men whose attire makes us
dissatisfied with our own tailors, and whose manner
makes their vices wear a proper gloss, there lies real
danger.

THE legend — whatever hint one has here to give
of its causes — is perhaps as potent a one as the world

130 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

of pleasure knows. Far dwellers in an unsophisti-
cated West imagine that the pinnacles of possibilities
in riotous living are, one the one hand, Maxim's, and
on the other, Monte Carlo. Do you tell the would-be
gallant of the backwoods that you have been in Paris
now and again? He winks at you and says,
"Maxim's, eh?" Discuss the a-las of to-day with an
ancient amateur of Parisian cuisine, and he may at
any moment break into fabulous recollections of what
a devil he was at Maxim's "in the eighties."

So far the dream . . .

A fine conceit, in truth, and hard enough to sep-
arate from fact. For the object is one to which most
folk do not bring a sober, normal vision. They
visit the place illumined by the legend and by liquor.

Whereas, the fact . . .

THERE may be many other places in the world to-
day where the legend lives on liquor, and there cer-
tainly was one yesterday; that was the Whitechapel
Club in Chicago. There was no fun going into it
soberly. Soberly considered, it was merely foul,
blasphemous and brutal.

Soberly considered — but Maxim's should not be
soberly considered, if the legend is to be preserved.

Of the daytime, it is not germane to write. The
legend says nothing of the daytime Maxim's. So it
need not hurt the legend if we remark that it is pos-
sible, passing from the Place de la Concorde toward
the Madeleine, to observe nothing whatever of the
existence of Maxim's, any more than of Weber's or
of Lucas'. If you went in before candlelight, you
would find emptiness, sleepy but insolent waiters and

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 131

the general somnolence of a spider awaiting prey.
The tables on the trottoir yawn; these hours, for
Maxim's, are as the night hours to a farmer.

Maxim's at night! Ah — how they smiled, those
dear fellows who once tried to lure me on toward
the legendary home of all the Loreleis of the Rue
Royale ! For I, like you who read this, had fed upon
the legend. I awaited — who knows what wonders I
But I made, alas, the great mistake: I was too sober
when I went to see my dream come true. My sober
eyes strayed coldly to where, along the walls, the
beauties of the legend sat. . . . Beauties? They
were the same you had seen at the Marigny, at the
Folies Bergeres, everywhere. Dressed magnificently,
but impossibly, they were never for one sober second
to be mistaken for anything but what they were. The
paints, the enamels and the powder did not disguise
the hardness in their only rarely handsome faces.
The eyes, the eyes of the vulture and the vampire ;
the voices not those of sirens, but of shrill, false
vulgarities. The waiters had the dreadful familiar-
ity that denotes accomplices in crime. The guests —
the princes, either of Marsovia or of Pittsburg, in
the legend — were of the type of men who order
steak and seek cocktails on the boulevards; in brief,
the Americans who belong to another legend alto-
gether, the unfortunately verified legend of the
"Seeing Chinatown" cars and the Cook's tours. Ill-
fitting evening clothes mingled with sombrero hats.
Bad French vied with nasal United States. An
orchestra tried to drown the nasalities with its own
strident notes. The ladies — "when I say ladies, of
course ..." went back and forth, upstairs,

132 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

through curtains, ever swishing perfume too palp-
ably, ogling too brazenly, shrilling too bravely their
laughter.

"Come," said my friend, the Parisian of the
Parisians, he who has told all the diplomatic mys-
teries of Europe in words that America could swal-
low, he who has reported every great event in Paris
for the last fifteen years, and known all the rising
litterateurs, and been himself the finest Franco-
American phenomenon of the lot — "Come," said he,
"and you shall see the really interesting spot, where
all the intimate interviews take place; where Nini
and Fifi meet the princes and the incognito foreign-
ers, and where " And he led me to the curtain

where at one side went the men, the other the
women, at moments when they wished to be alone.
And that was the precious, famous spot ! The reek
of powder, of cigarettes, was just the same reek that
is always behind such curtains all the world over.
And in that milieu, where Nini was about to confer
with Fifi as to the value of the evening's catch, were
supposed to take place the romantic discoverings of
the — shall I say "affinities" that have gone to the
Maxim legend!

No; it was not for sober view. Garish, rather
than brilliant. More expensive than the Haymar-
ket, but none too remote from it in method. Tired
were the dancers when they were not inebriate ; dull
were the poisoned eyes when they did not sparkle
with greed. If the dresses had sat there empty, if
the powder and the perfume had floated forth, but
from no bodily encircling skirts, the lover of the
legend might quite easily have peopled the place

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 133

with the fair ones of his dream. But these! The
harpies of the world; no other than the harpies of
the Friedrichstrasse, of the London promenades,
and of the lobster palaces in the borough of Man-
hattan.

Beautiful? Yes. Gay? Yes. Desirable? Yes.
Provided always that you came immersed in legend
or in liquor. The one or the other made the greedy
eyes look kind, the vapid lips seem merry, the
rastas look like princes, and, in brief, the real
Maxim's look like the Maxim's of
Lolo, Dodo, Joujou,
Cloclo, Margot, Froufrou.

the Maxim's of "La Dame de chez Maxim," and of
the final scene in that operetta in which Franz Lehar
scored the greatest international success our world
has known in a quarter of a century.

With that inevitable bias toward the absurd that
begins to mark the progress of our puritan decline,
there were those in whom the final scene in "The
Merry Widow" evoked remonstrance. To repro-
duce, upon the stage, a place like that. . . .
Unmindful of the other dozen or so of plays that
had helped to build the legend, these good people
entirely overlooked the essential truth that the place
itself never was anything like the brilliant dream of
fair women which the theater and fiction imposed
upon our imagination.

"The corks go pop," as the air has it; "we dance
and never stop"; and that is quite true; but the peo-
ple behind the "pop" differ but little from the wine-
openers of Broadway, and from the dancers of any
"swell ball" that engages the presence of our poli-

134 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

ticians, our bookmakers, our "pugs" and their
brides.

So, once again, the lie has grown a wonderful
thing, while the truth is a thing for scorn. There is
philosophy in that. You will find no better philos-
ophy at Maxim's, the real Maxim's. As for the
Maxim's of legend — it was a delightful dream; but
— a dream no less !

Ill

PARIS AS IT PASSES

NOT only dreams and illusions, but old landmarks
succumb to time and progress in Paris as elsewhere.
Most men who have fallen under the spell of Paris
have counted as part of its fascination the legend of
Maxim's, and — that legend we have but now put to
the ruthless test of truth. Another item in its fasci-
nation, surely, has been to sit at the Cafe de la Paix.
Was it not there, within half an hour of entering
Paris, that I sat with Vingtoin. . . ? And now
there is rumor that the Cafe de la Paix is to go.

Who that has not written or declaimed about
Paris but has insisted upon the charm of that
corner of the boulevard where the terrace of the
Cafe de la Paix gives not only upon the boulevard
itself, but upon the magnificent space in front of the
Opera, the fine descent of the Avenue de 1'Opera, and
even the terminal of that most hideous and common-
place Parisian thoroughfare, the Street of the Fourth
of September? Long it had been a cherished saying
of that extinct type, the boulevardier, that you had
only to sit long enough at one of the little round-top-

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 135

ped tables upon that terrace — let us use that direct
translation for the Frenchman's "terrasse," meaning
simply the portion of the sidewalk nearest to the
building, which portion the cafe proprietor covers
with tables and chairs — to see all the celebrities of
the world go by. There is not a writer in English,
from Richard Harding Davis up — or down, as you
may choose to think — who has not used that pleasant
allusion. It is a fable that every great corner in every
clime has arrogated to itself; but it has been more
true of that Cafe de la Paix corner than of most. The
boulevardier, in the elder comprehension, is now
dead; he has been succeeded by the Rasta, from
South America, and the millionaire, from North. Is
that great corner itself to go; or, at any rate, to
change; just as the tribe of the boulevardier has
changed? To be succeeded, then, by what?

By nothing less, or more, so goes report, than that
Mecca of the American woman, the Bon Marche.
Such plan means that the entire block, to include the
Grand Hotel, will be torn down and made over to
accommodate the great department store that has
piled up a fortune for the Maison Boucicault. Has
then indeed the rivalry of the great institutions on the
"right" bank at last become too much for the estab-
lishment at the top of the Rue du Bac, that it has
determined to array itself in closer conflict and proxi-
mity against the Louvre, the Printemps, and the
Galeries Lafayette? Americans and English, it has
been true, have not much minded the jaunt over to
the left bank; it was always so fatally easy to fall
into the cab habit and simply utter syllables to the
coachman. Plenty of the lumbering old omnibuses

136 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

went there, too, from the "imperiales" of which you
still get the finest views of Paris in its most central
life and movement. But, despite notions to the con-
trary, it is not the Americans who support the great
shops of Paris ; the custom most desired is that of the
Parisians themselves. What the American buys, let
us say, once a year, the Parisian is buying constantly,
bewilderingly. The quantity of toilettes that a
Parisian woman, whether of the great world or of
the several that touch its fringes, will get through
with in the course of a year is simply amazing to
those who conceive woman's mission in the world as
something else than a creature to be dressed and
undressed.

What such a move would mean, then, is that the
Parisians themselves have gradually been tiring of
the journey across the Seine. For, with the exception
of a few old families, relics, as it were of a faded
period, the people with money to spend no longer
live in the old St. Germain quarter, and as for the
new district building up behind the Eiffel Tower,
that is about as far from the Rue du Bac as from the
Boulevard Haussman.

The prosperity of the Galeries Lafayette must
have become familiar to even the most casual visitor
to Paris. In the last ten years alone, not to speak of
still smaller beginnings, it has expanded across the
street, until now its newer wing on the Boulevard
Haussman opposite the simple offices of the great
Morgan-Drexel-Harjes banking institution is larger
than the parent house itself.

It has become, this corner of the Boulevard
Haussman, the place most frequented by the shopping

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 137

population of Paris. If you wanted to see the busy
folk, bourgeois, fashionable and super-fashionable,
it was this corner you had need to observe. The
stream of idlers that made perpetual procession be-
fore the Cafe de la Paix was quite another matter.
Before those little round tables, whether on the
boulevard side or the side leading toward the Opera,
the strollers of both sexes went ceaselessly, and
never a moment of the day but had its interest for
the onlooker; but that other corner behind, not be-
fore, the Opera, that corner on the Haussman, that
was where the fair sex reigned supreme. Here were
no male strollers; there was not, indeed, any strolling
at all ; it was a continual coming and going of shop-
pers, of people inspecting the wares so recklessly dis-
played upon the sidewalk itself. On foot, in cabs,
in taxis, and in their own carriages, here passed all
that was fair in Paris. Man, at this particular spot,
was there only to "stand and wait." If he was wise
he did not pass beyond those portals with his wife
or his daughter or another man's ditto. He waited,
meekly, and obtained some slight reward for his pa-
tience in watching the kaleidoscopic colors of a great
Parisian corner. For, though all were in a hurry,
some there were, still, who took advantage of that;
hoarse and nasal-voiced peddlers of postcards im-
ploring the crowd to "demand the cards postal with
Monsieur Bleriot and his aeroplane"; commission-
aires from the shops, assisting carriage folk obse-
quiously and foot folk brusquely; Americans strug-
gling with the dreadful French tongue, only to find
that even the salesman on the sidewalk talked perfect
English; and many other fleeting delights. But al-

138 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

ways, and above all else: woman. Rarely beautiful;
but turned out, oh, turned out as, beyond question,
no other woman in the world is turned out.

THE change threatening the Cafe de la Paix cor-
ner will be interesting to note. The result may, pos-
sibly, intensify the present attractiveness. Hitherto
a corner giving upon the great idling and curious
throng, it may now take on something of the nature
of that other corner, just described; the boulevard
may for the first time find, upon its leisurely borders,
the spectacle of the great mob of feminine shoppers
added to its existing charms. For, so far, none of
the great shops in Paris have been actually upon the
"grand" boulevard. Not, that is, any of the great
department shops. There is the "Trois Quartiers"
across from the Madeleine; then, beyond the Opera,
is the great "White" establishment; but these par-
take in no way of general department shops. Far,
far down, almost as far as the Place de la Repub-
lique, are some Galeries St. Martin, where excellent
perfumery is sold cheaply; but to all intents the big
places have all been elsewhere. The Printemps,
whose proprietor went shockingly bankrupt in sugar
speculations a few years ago is, with the Galeries
Lafayette, on the Haussman; the "Belle Jardiniere"
is down near the river; the "Samaritaine" is on the
Rue de Rivoli, where that street loses its character
of neighbor to the Tuileries and takes on the color
of the nearby vegetable markets.

Possibly, as was said, the character of that Cafe
de la Paix corner may acquire a new charm; but
where are we to be while we observe that charm?

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 139

What is to become of that crowd of onlookers who
have for these many decades filled those chairs and
sipped mild beverages at those little round-topped
tables? Not, of course, that it has been the only
vantage point upon the grand boulevards, but it has
been the most admittedly popular. At Weber's, on
the Rue Royale; at Durand's, at the Grand Cafe, at
the Riche, at Poussets's, the Cafe Viennois — at all
the innumerable places up toward the Rue Mont-
martre itself, there are never vacant chairs for more
than a few seconds. There were those, too, who
came to look upon a sitting outside the Cafe de la
Paix as an advertisement of one's ignorance of
Paris, just as there are those who know their Paris
far too well ever to go near, in their sober senses,
any such places, cafes or so-called bars, as include the
name American in their title. Yet, there is no wis-
dom without folly; whether, eventually, in spite of
its odor of the outlandish and the outmoded, the
Cafe de la Paix became a conscious habit with us or
not, it was a place at which to have sat.

It was at night that the spectacle was at its best.
Its charms were then accentuated by the lights, by
the increase in mere leisurely traffic, by the obvious
pursuit of pleasure. Within the cafes solid burgh-
ers dined and played dominos interminably; pretty
women were eating and drinking, reading the news-
papers, one another's toilettes and the nature of men;
but that was background; the boulevard itself was
the play. Men and women afoot, eager for life,
or weary of it, but all keyed up, somehow, to a some-
times passionate tension that Paris exercises allur-
ingly and sometimes brutally; cabs and taxis, some

140 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

scurrying in the true French recklessness across any
open spaces the street might offer, others crawling,
as the London phrase has it; the fashionably dressed,
and the fantastically dressed, the rich and the poor.
The well-fed gourmet on his way to Voisin's or the
Anglais might be shouldered by one who, if not ac-
tually an apache, looked so fit to commit murder for
twenty sous, that to hang him on suspicion would be
a benefaction. Strange gutter creatures approached
the tables, spearing, with pointed stick, cigar and
cigarette butts as accurately as the seahawk diving
for a fish. The newspaper peddlers of Paris are
themselves worth an entire chapter. Custom seems
to prevent the same newsboy selling more than one
sort of paper. As a result, we have a procession of
weird creatures uttering each a strange cry, and each
seeming to carry never more than half a dozen copies
of this or that printed sheet; first, we are asked to
"demand La Brehse," which is an effort in onoma-
topeia to reproduce the strange nasal argot of these
hawkers; then the last edition of a lottery drawing;
then the "Batrie" (these guttermongers have an
aversion to the consonant "p")» and so on for half
the night. The throng flows ceaselessly; and those
who walk regard those seated quite as closely as the
latter return the attention. The burgher and his
wife; the student and his sweetheart; the night-
hawks looking for prey — all these come and go, go
and come.

Yes, if you sat there long enough, day and dusk,
you would see most of the people who were worth
while, to say nothing of many more whom it was as
well not to see.

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 141

COSMOPOLITAN as this throng, passing that cor-
ner, has been in its time, it is elsewhere, after all, that
one has had, of late, to look for the most "rigolo"
types of "all Paris," which means, to some, all the
world. If the Cafe de la Paix corner loses its old
character, then the Avenue du Bois remains. That
has been the most famous of all the thoroughfares
for seeing the fashion and the frailty, the blossom
and the musk, the notabilities and the notorious, of
Paris. Through this funnel, every fine afternoon of
the season, the world spilled itself into the Bois; for
two sous, upon a little metal chair at the corner, the
Etoile in view, as well as the parklike lane to the park
itself, you could watch the carriages, the cars and
the more leisurely saunterers; here it was not neces-
sary even to buy a drink.

It is this point that the artists Sem and Roubille
chose when they portrayed Paris as it passes in their
most arresting exhibition of wooden caricatures.
This diorama was in its time on view in the Rue
Royale, in Monte Carlo and in London.

In this diorama you could watch uall Paris," as if
you were standing at the Avenue Malakoff, with the
Trianon-like house of the Castellane-Sagan-Gould es-
tablishment in the background. Space does not per-
mit mention of all the merely Paris celebrities on
view in this exhibition; but some known to Cosmop-
olis at large cannot fail to interest even America.
Here went M. Martel of brandy fame; there Henry
Labouchere's son-in-law, the Marchese de Rudini.
Literary celebrities follow closely: George Feydeau,
famous for his farces; Tristan Bernard, another
playwright; Henri Bernstein, whose plays and duels

1 42 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

England and America know; and no less than Ed-
mond Rostand himself, under a gray Spanish som-
brero, walking with James Hazen Hyde. Here is
Count Robert de Montesquiou ; and there the satirist,
Ernest Lajeunesse. Presently come James Gordon
Bennett; two of the Rothschilds, Raoul Gunsbourg
of the Monte Carlo Opera ; Prince Troubetskoi, and
such internationally known artists as Boldini, Forain
and Helleu. The corseted figure of Boni de Castel-
lane swings by, twirling a cane. Then come folk in
carriages or motors, ranging all the way from Tod
Sloan to the late King Edward. Artistes like Max
Dearly, Polaire and Otero ; the late king of the Bel-
gians; celebrities of turf and finance and of that
world wherein Emilienne d'Alencon and Rita del
Erido are prominent. Whether anything like it
could be done outside of Paris, or, at any rate, be-
yond the confines of the European continent, is a
question. The promenade is an art distinctly Paris-
ian. There is, to be sure, an hour in the season when
Bond Street, Fifth Avenue, Boylston Street see a
passing-by of people well worth seeing; but we
scarcely ever, in Anglo-Saxon centers, assemble such
widely diverging types of character.

All depends upon the eye of the beholder. We,
on the American side, are perhaps still somewhat
too thin-skinned to endure patiently the cosmopolitan
caricaturist's contemplations. There is always, be-
tween a society and its critics, a necessary collabora-
tion before the really valuable effect is gained. It
is certainly an interesting speculation whether any
Anglo-Saxon corner in Cosmopolis would afford the
pencil of the caricaturist such opportunities as Sem

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 143

and Roubille have taken advantage of. About that,
however, as about the future of the famous corner
on the boulevard, only Time knows the answer.

IV

IN COOKING STILL SUPREME

YET some of the old legends hold, some land-
marks stay. In food for all mankind, as in fashions
for the fair, Paris still leads the world. The years
have not appreciably changed that fact. Tastes in
clothes and cutlets differ, thank fate, or the world
would be a melancholy monochrome ; there be points
upon which the American woman surpasses her
French sister in attaining to the ideal exterior; there
may be hardy beefeaters who prefer the chop-houses
of London and New York to the exquisite dinners
of Paris ; but in the main the fair-minded gourmet can
still discern daylight between Paris and the rest of
the world; she still leads. Especially does she shine
against the dismal dinners and the dreary dressing
of London. Not even the brilliance of a Coronation
atoned for the atrocities that London still insists on
forcing upon the unhappy stranger, atrocities of
fashion and cuisine. London's rank as a city in
which to dine is still far in the rear of many other
great towns and certainly not within hailing distance
of New York. It is true that in the last score of
years London has improved; the passing stranger is
no longer compelled to dine either from the joint or
not at all, but it is still indisputable that no matter
how luxurious may seem the dining-room into which

144 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

he enters, he does not really get his money's worth.

There you have the difference between dining in
Paris and in London. I have gone haphazard into
a little brasserie on the Boulevard Montmartre, and
I have had set before me, as the regular fixed dinner
of the day, a meal that you could not equal, for sheer
satisfaction to the eye as well as to the stomach, in
all London, at four times the price. No, for what
it charges, London never gives a cosmopolitan his
or her money's worth; so much is certain.

I have compared notes with many another vaga-
bond, and I find no divergence from this opinion. If
you consider London, to be concise, as a place to dine
in, what do you find? There are the huge hotels —
the Cecil, the Savoy, the Carlton, the Ritz and many
others. But it is not into these that the vagrom man
or woman is likely to pop on the spur of a hungry
moment. It is just on this side that Paris remains
so supreme ; let your mood catch you on any street,
it will be rarely that the first decent-seeming place
you enter does not eventually furnish you with a
pleasant repast. The places in London where the
casual appetite may be satisfied include Prince's on
Piccadilly, the Royal on Regent Street, Romano's
in the Strand, the Trocadero on Shaftesbury Avenue,
Dieudonne's on Ryder Street and Scott's at the top
of the Haymarket. At Prince's you must engage
tables beforehand. If you have done that, you are
sure to see a number of persons of title and millions.
But as to the food — well, a habitue of Martin's or
Delmonico's could not possibly go into raptures over
it. The bill is not calculated to appeal to the casual
and the curious stranger, however much he or she

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 145

may teem with solicitude for the stomach. At the
Royal it is about the same. At the Trocadero one
finds a little more life and sparkle. The British fash-
ion of ladies, who are sometimes ladies only by
lapse, smoking after dinner may be observed here
at every other table. Also, one has the interest of
knowing that the rooms he is sitting in are on the site
of the notorious Argyle Rooms, familiar to all who
have gone into the history of the supposedly wicked
side of life in great cities.

The method of dining that obtains at the Troca-
dero is typical of many similar places in London.
In the same room you may be served any of three
or more different dinners. One is at twelve shillings
and sixpense; one at ten shillings, another at seven
and another at five. Now, about this sort of thing
there is always the uncomfortable suspicion that the
seven-shilling dinner, say, is the remains of some
other person's twelve and sixpenny dinner. The
courses are plenty, but they are all equally heavy.
The best soup you get in London is a bisque of
crayfish. The entrees are French in name, but Eng-
lish in their construction. If you are drinking wine,
all is well; England invariably has good, if expen-
sive, clarets, and her champagnes are as good as
ours, and no dearer. But if you should prefer to
have some light beer served, as one may always
have it served in the most splendid of New York's
dining-rooms, in carafe, you at once come a cropper.
Beer, you are told, is only served downstairs in the
grillroom. And from this and similar rules there is
no diverging for love nor money. When you reach
the dessert, which all England terms "the sweets,"

146 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

it comes to you wheeled on a neat little traveling
waiter. The ice, also, is very fine to gaze upon. As
it approaches you on its little carriage that is
wheeled about the room it shines as with electric
light, quite in the manner of the ices brought in on
some German Atlantic liners when the captain's din-
ner is on. Meanwhile, there is a band playing, and
there are bare shoulders enough all around to make
a cannibal's mouth water; the smoke of cigarettes
filters toward the ceiling, and the gold tips are con-
stantly kissed by over-red lips. But, when the steep
bill comes, has the diner had his money's worth?
No ! a thousand times no ! It is hard to say defi-
nitely, this course was badly cooked, this entree was
tasteless; but the fact remains that London food
rarely delights the palate. It may make bone and
sinew — I dare say it does — but it is never seasoned
properly; it lacks salt at all times; and no matter
how elaborate its surroundings may have been, it
never by any chance suggests the perfect meal.

The safest thing for the vagrom man in Lon-
don today is still the thing that was safest twenty
years ago, namely, to pop into the first public house
he sees and partake of the so-called ordinary. He
will, at least, get good beef and potatoes, and he
can always help himself plentifully to the salt. His
bill will not necessarily remind him that he has paid
a great deal for very little. As to the appetite of
the fairer sex, well, there's a sad matter! If she be
not omnivorous in respect of what the English term
"a tea," which includes bread and butter and various
sorts of cake, she will fare but poorly in the largest

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 147

city in the world. She will I fear, have to put up
with the dinners of Prince's and his lesser rivals.
The Strand, of course, teems with places where one
can eat. But to eat is not to have dined!

There, exactly, is where London fails; you may
eat there, but you can seldom dine. Yet there be
Englishmen who will rave you wonderful things
about London as a solace to the gourmet. A dear
fellow of my acquaintance, for instance, a man who
is very different from the ordinary insular Briton,
a man who has consorted much with the more
mercurial spirits of England, such as "Johnny"
Toole, "Dundreary" Sothern, and their newer
peers, once gave me an elaborate list of the places
in London where one could find what he called
"beautiful food!" Dear fellow! if I cannot thank
him for all the experiences in dining that he pre-
pared for me, I can still feel eminently grateful to
him for that phrase, "beautiful food."

FOR "beautiful food" is just what Paris does give
you, in every sense of the word. No matter
whether you are at the Ritz or at any chance bras-
serie on any chance boulevard, it is still "beautiful
food." I really think that in all my experience I
have only happened upon about one positively bad
dinner in Paris, no matter how low the price I was
paying. In the first place, you are always sure of
good, crisp bread and fresh butter. In London one
is likely to encounter some most impenetrable bread,
though the butter is mostly prime. Next, the linen
on a Parisian dinner-table is a delight that makes

148 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

for rapture in the female breast and appetite in both
sexes. Even where there is only sand on the floor,
there is sure to be spotless linen on the table.

I have gone into little holes-in-the-wall on the
Boulevard Montmartre, where white sand was on
the floor, and where cheaply but artistically garbed
grisettes wandered in and out, and my dinner, at the
price of about sixty cents, or half a crown, with red
wine of the country included, has been one that for
real satisfaction all London could not equal. For
this price one has the choice either of a good soup,
a soup that has taste to it, and is not, like most Eng-
lish soups, a mere unsalted liquid; or, if you decline
soup, the variety of fresh radishes, or salad or spicy
sausage, or anchovies, or sardines, that are known
as, hors d'oeuvres; then you may have two meat
courses, each of which is sure to be perfectly cooked;
next comes a vegetable, served as a separate course.
To pass these French vegetables, cooked as Paris
cooks them, without further comment, were to be
unjust. Such green peas, and such string beans,
such asparagus, as you may get in these insignificant,
cheap little dinners! Why, not the most priceless
dinner in England gives you anything that so satis-
fies one's notion of food as it should be as do these
little dishes of vegetables at any little brasserie in
Paris.

And no matter how queer and how cheap your
little Parisian brasserie may seem, you are sure to
find Americans not far off. These Americans, more-
over, are not by any means slumming; they are sim-
ply on the hunt for "beautiful food." Concerning
the delights of the Ritz, of Voisin, of Paillard and

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 149

of the Anglais, there are plenty who will tell you
wonderful things. But about certain other sides of
dining in Paris there has not been such a plethora
of fact and fiction. If you were to ask me how best
to live in Paris, gastronomically considered, with-
out absolutely advertising the fact that you are a
millionaire, I should advise one visit to each of the
famous places I have mentioned, and thereafter a
browsing into less expensive fields.

You must go, of course, to Marguery's, far up the
boulevard, not far from the Porte Martin. Not to
have eaten Sole a la Marguery is not to have known
dining in Paris. You are sure to have pleasant
memories of Marguery's, no matter what may be
the size of your bill. The heart of Paris is hum-
ming a couple of miles away, but Sole a la Marguery
brings all devotees of "beautiful food" together.
Another reason why one went to Marguery's in the
old days was that the venerable proprietor was one
of the handsomest men in Paris. No matter how
low an opinion your fair friends might have formed
of the Parisian men in general, that white-haired,
soldierly figure at Marguery's atoned for a great
deal.

Passing from Marguery's to the neighborhood of
the Madeleine, there is a large choice of good places.
Durand's is comparatively dear, and overinfested
with the type of American who wishes to be seen
rather than to be an artist in dining. Moreover, at
Durand's, as at most of the places of this type, one
is invariably enticed into dining in a cabinet, or
private room; this is always twice as dear, and there
is really nothing gained. Except as an aid to the

150 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

average French farce — or the average French af-
fair of the heart (which also is but another sort of
farce) — the cabinet particulier has no real reason
for existence. The place where you really can dine
delightfully in this district is Lucas'. You are in
sight of the Madeleine; you can, if the evening per-
mit, have the cloth laid on one of the tables outdoors,
and you will be most pleasantly served. You will
have to order from the card; but you will hardly
regret this. The life of the boulevard flows con-
stantly into the Rue Royale before you, and, as
the day darkens and the lights begin to glimmer,
the spectacle constantly takes on new attractions.
Fox terriers come wandering out of dark doorways,
followed by the concierges whose pets they are. Lit-
tle milliners trot homeward quickly; devotees of an-
other profession pass at a more indolent gait.
Meanwhile, Lucas' eagle-eyed head waiter is seeing
that the entree is just right, the little peas — oh, those
little peas chez Lucas! — just of the right savor, and
that, for these American tastes, there are fans and
also plenty of ice in the glasses.

Ah, yes! thank fate, in Paris, as in Berlin, one
can find plenty of that article so strange, so unknown
in London — ice. Also water. A cup of coffee is
never served in Berlin without a glass of water; in
Paris it is more likely to be cognac than water; but
in London the fluid water is quite unknown to the
average waiter. At Lucas', if one does not have
more than a little chicken, some fresh peas, a salad
and some coffee, he is sure to depart beautifully con-
scious of having assisted at an artistic moment. One
point about coffee and brandy that the stranger must

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 151

take note of in Paris is that the ordinary cognac
always served with coffee is a cheap type of brandy,
and that if he wishes — later in the evening, per-
haps— to take a little cognac by itself, he must not
ask for cognac, but for fine champagne. He usually
dines in one place, takes his coffee somewhere else,
and perhaps his final liqueur still somewhere else.

IF I have singled out Lucas' as a place most ex-
cellent for those who wish, at moderate prices, to
dine from the card, the places where one may dine
at a fixed price are countless. Any insignificant little
brasserie on the boulevard Montmartre will do.

On the Place Clichy one evening when the famous
Fete de Neuilly, at which all fashionable Paris goes
slumming and playing at being child again, had just
been moved over to Montmartre, I dined quite
pleasantly at Le Rat Mort. The soup was excellent,
despite the shudder the gentler members of our
party could not suppress when they thought of what
the restaurant's name implied. From the windows
of the Rat Mort we gazed upon a trio of brilliant
and noisy carrousels, all whirling madly to the mad-
dest of tunes. Gay beauties came wandering down
from the farthest heights of Montmartre — models
and such as were by no means models — and seated
themselves, with elaborate exposition of lace and
frill, upon the horses of the merry-go-rounds. On
one of these merry-go-rounds the steeds were pigs,
that heaved up and down like ships at sea, with the
gay Parisiennes bounding provokingly and enticingly
up and down, all smiles and shouts and hosiery.
What, in all the solemn, smoky, stolid business of

i5 2 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

London dining, can equal a sixty-cent dinner at the
Dead Rat, or the Broken Pipe, or many another
curious little place in Paris? Not even to New
York have we been able to export the happy gaiety
of these uncouth little holes; with us there comes
always too great an intrusion of the tough element.
The Parisians can be poor and still gay, exuberant
and still decent. They can drink oceans of their
cheap red wine without wishing to burn up the house
or fight the neighbors. At the worst, they cry aloud
for a political revolution of some sort; but the
method is rarely a personal one.

Yes, Paris is still the home of the most "beautiful
food" in the world. Beautiful in every sense of the
word; the dining-rooms, the diners as well as the
dinner, all are equally pleasing to one's sense of
beauty. What is true of Paris itself is true of the
spots near by. Than Paris-Bellevue, for example,
there is nothing more pleasant conceivable. In the
distance twinkles Paris with its million points of
light; dark below you flows the Seine; you can trace
St. Cloud and Verseilles shimmering hazily. The
food before you promises delight; everything here,
as generally in Paris, caters not so much to appetite
as to the art of dining. Which, assuredly, is an art
like any other.

An art of which Paris remains past mistress.

WHERE, in the printed record, or in the facts to
go upon that record, have we the equivalent, on this
side of the Atlantic, to such pleasures of the table?
How small is the shelf in that sort here ! Francis
Saltus wrote stories and verses about things to eat

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 153

and drink; and Jerome Hart once devoted a chapter
to the cooking in San Francisco and New Orleans,
and to the abominations current in the vast inns
along our Florida coasts; but in the main, in fiction,
or in descriptive chronicling, the detail of meat and
drink is sadly scamped by us. We travel abroad in
our thousands, and we return full of wonderful
tales of what other lands contrive to do to our tastes
and our stomachs; but here at home — well, I need
only to recall certain remarks of M. Hugues Le
Roux in French and Freiherr von Wolzogen in Ger-
man, who declared that the prevailing note of our
cuisine was Cold Storage. Ice, they wailed, took the
savor out of our food, our fruit, our wines — to say
nothing of our amatory relations.

Truly, the path of the proper gourmet in America
is but infrequently beset with rewards. Now and
again, in this or that nook, he finds a haven of refuge
for his digestion, for his palate — for such pleasures
of the table, in short, as appeal to the eye, to the
taste and to the memory — but how long do those
havens survive the money fever? The ancient trav-
elers like nothing much better than to lament the
passing of this or that famous eating-place in Paris;
but even the modern wanderer within our own bor-
ders has to take note of the speed with which first
too much popularity and then inevitable decline over-
take the places that try to cater to the art of dining
rather than merely to appetite.

Yes, it is vastly unprofitable to contrast the field
over which Lieutenant-Colonel Newnham-Davis
roamed before giving us his "Gourmet's Guide to
Europe" and the field which confronts a similar ad-

154 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

venture here. Still, one wishes the experiment might
be tried here. Not the sort of thing that a James
Clarence Harvey once did under some "Bohemian"
title of other; not merely an advertisement of con-
spicuous feeding-places for the conspicuous members
of our half-world of vanity; but a conscientious, un-
biased record of what experiences are possible in
American towns to the true disciple of Brillat-
Savarin, or even to the person who is ordinarily
careful of his interior arrangements.

If the thing is ever to be done, let us hope that it
will be Colonel Newnham-Davis who will do it.
He has proved himself the first of Anglo-Saxon
authorities in these matters; his little book is a
model; and such of us as have been in the habit of
proclaiming aloud the merits of terrapin, of planked
shad, of chicken Maryland, of 'possum and sweet
potatoes, of pompano and of many other purely
American specialties, should unite in inviting this
eminent authority over here for purposes of com-
piling a "Gourmet's Guide to America." He might,
it is true, consider us somewhat arrogant in our as-
sumption of title to an entire Continent; he might,
remembering his Parisian hours, remind us that
there are Americans of the South, as well as of the
northern half; but all that would merely extend the
scope of his enterprise, from our peculiar kitchen —
hardly more definable than the American type of
citizen, so compound is it of many alien qualities —
to the various Latin kitchens of South America and
Mexico.

THAT Colonel Newnham-Davis agrees with the

THE COURTESAN OF CITIES 155

pages of mine you have just been reading is made
clear by the fact that France occupies nearly a third
of his book; and the first fifty pages are devoted
to Paris alone. No matter how devoted you are to
the theory that when you die you will go to Paris,
if you read his little book carefully, you will be as-
tonished to discover what you do not know. The
Parisian resorts patronized by the well-to-do cos-
mopolitans are contrasted against those frequented
by the Parisian burghers themselves, and the places
on the Left Bank are detailed as thoroughly as the
others. Even the summer places, partly in the open
air, have several pages to themselves. And so it is
throughout the book. From Spain to Petersburg,
and from Sicily to Ostend, our author points the
gastronomic way.

No mere amateur in "beautiful food" may at-
tempt to improve on the fine catholicity displayed
by Colonel Davis, yet there are a few places not
mentioned by him which seem to me worth mention.
In Berlin, for instance, in the list of those places
which, as the book says, "lovers of good wines
should not miss," should be included an old-fashioned
place, formerly on the Potsdamer Strasse, and now
near by, called Fredericks. In the old days it was
frequented by ruddy-faced ancients in uniform whose
stripes and epaulets told the tale of their rank to
those cognizant. Again in Tuscany, any rustic
kitchen will supply an omelet con pane that deserves
memory. In Sorrento, the restaurant of the Vit-
toria deserves rank with the best in southern Italy;
and the luncheon in the Vesuve, in Naples, is so good
as to attract almost as m^.nv outsiders as the view

156 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

from Bertolini's. In the matter of coffee, one of
the best cups of it to be found outside of Vienna —
and don't we all know how bad coffee can be in
Europe! — is in the Hotel Imperial, in Trent, the
proprietor of which happens to be a connoisseur of
the berry from Bogota.

But, when all is said and done, it is always to
Paris we return when we feel that we would dine
as artists and as amateurs of art. Paris still reigns
supreme in cooking and cocottes.

COMES the moment for good-bye to Paris, to that
dear city of delight which, with its legends, its pano-
rama, its cooks and its cocottes, held us so long.
Paris, with its myriad enchantments, and its daily
ruined dreams. Paris, with its arts and airs; its
tawdriness and dirt. Whether still enchanted, or
grimly disillusioned, we must be gone; work calls;
work and brute matter are out yonder, somewhere
beyond the fortifications ; we must not loll forever on
the Venusberg beside the Seine. The world, ugly
and terrible, calls. Somewhere men labor, and
grind, and sweat.

And so — good-bye to Paris. Smiling, she waves
at us; she is immortal, and the sons of men return
to her through all the centuries. She smiles good-
bye, knowing too well it means "Until we meet
again!"

CHAPTER SEVEN

BERLIN, NEWEST OF GREAT CITIES

IF the reader has not observed it, let me em-
phasize that this chronicle of mine follows
no logical routine of travel. Whim is the
only guide. To go, for instance, from
Munich to the Rhine-valley, thence to Paris, and
thence to Berlin, bound eventually for London, would
scarcely be the method of persons wishing to "do
Europe'" in a given space of time. But to such per-
sons I have nothing to say. As whim takes me over
the paths of memory, so I stray leisurely, up this or
that by-way. Similarities are no oftener my lure
than violent contrasts. Comparison is one of the
chief charms of life and travel. What superficially
seems unreasoning whim is often rooted in most
logical procedure. If, then, I ask you, leaving Paris
where men perpetually seek pleasure, art and cook-
ing, to pass onward to Berlin, the logic in my whim
should be obvious. Berlin is the newest entrant in
the circle of the world's great cities; her challenge
is the boldest in the arena of Cosmopolis. Her pur-
suits, too, let us examine; her pursuit of culture, of
pleasure, and of cooking. And, while the taste of
Paris cooking is not yet faded from us, let us make
a little inquiry into a typical cuisine as a beginning
from which to consider Berlin at large.

157

158 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

FOOD FOB THE MILLION

IT is in Berlin that the American metropolitan
air is most closely paralleled. Not in London, not in
Vienna, not in Paris; not even in Munich; but in
Berlin. The look of modernity; the speed of build-
ing; the traffic by day and night, all wear an air of
home to a citizen of the Western continent. Indeed,
the amateur of statistics may be surprised to find that
the growth of Berlin since '71 has made it the marvel
among modern towns. It was in that town that
Bernhard Kempinski became one of the greatest
restaurateurs of the world. Indeed, we may use his
career, just closed, as a measuring stick for Berlin's
growth into greatness.

In London and in New York we are inclined to
attach notoriety to the names of establishments that
charge tremendous prices rather than to those that
best solve the problem of catering to the great mid-
dle class. We have too empty a space between the
exclusive luxury of the millionaire and the dyspeptic
democracy of Child's. Until a still recent, imperti-
nent attempt to foist upon New York an Alpine scale
of prices beyond anything ever tried there, one had
not thought there was any limit to the absurd prices
New Yorkers were willing to pay; but the quick
failure of the Cafe le 1'Opera showed that there is,
even in the most brazenly spendthrift town in Amer-
ica, a dead-line. It was Kempinski's triumph that
he gave the world, in his place on the Leipziger-
strasse, close to the corner of the Friedrichstrasse,

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 159

in Berlin, about as good food as you could get any-
where in the world at prices within the reach of all.
All this, too, upon the American principle of quick
service.

It is the one great count against our American
cuisine, from the European point of view, that our
love of haste spoils the best dishes. We do not, as
they tell us we should, order the day before and give
the chef a chance to get the best from his viands, his
condiments and his skill ; we sit down, we order, and
we expect to be fed at once. Even with those same
handicaps, then, Kempinski accomplished wonders.
It is true the Berliner is rather a great than a delicate
trencherman ; he likes quantity, and music and gayety.
Kempinski gave them all of that, and excellent wine
besides. The quantity of Sekt consumed in Kempin-
ski's must have reached an enormous total annually.
Even the most limelight-loving "wine-opener" in any
American city would have opened eyes to note the
matter-of-fact way in which the Kempinski patrons
consumed the domestic combination of grape and
carbonic acid gas. Not noisily, as if for an event;
but simply as something without which no dinner at
Kempinski's was complete.

Kempinski's fame grew with the fame of Berlin.
It was a bourgeois fame; an Englishman would be
likely to think it somewhat noisily German; a
Frenchman might turn up his nose at the cuisine;
but an American was pretty sure to think of places
a little like it in his home town. Solid citizens testi-
fied the solid fare; family parties proved the festive
respectability of the place. There were, as Berlin
grew, many other places, and many finer places;

160 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

but unless you had dined or supped once at Kempin-
ski's, you had not seen Berlin. There was even a
music hall song, dating from the Ueberbrettl' pe-
riod of the late nineties, called "Bei Kempinski."
One could gather an entire volume of caricatures
and of stories in which the name was made a sort
of modern classic.

Kempinski was an essential part of that great
modern metropolis that has been somewhat slowly
dawning upon Americans. One foresees the time
when the great trend will be toward Berlin rather
than Paris; it is certain that each year sees a great
increase of visitors to the German capital.

IT was all vastly different in the Berlin of twenty
years ago. An American visitor was rare. Almost
the only American article was the dentist; even then
it was considered both wise and fashionable to have
an American dentist. One had none too many places
in which to dine if, for exmaple, one wished to
see officers in uniform. The German tongue has a
phrase that marks a restaurant as "fit for officers" ;
if it was so "fit," you need ask nothing farther.
One establishment which was "offiziersfaehig" even
in those old days, which has seen all the changes,
all the growth of splendor and luxury, and gayety
and gallicism making up the Berlin of today, is
Frederich's, already mentioned at end of the pre-
vious chapter. Until it moved, the other day, into
a nearby side street, it was for years a pleasant
landmark on the Potsdamerstrasse. Officers of
the General Staff were ever wont to patronize it,
and the late Adolf Menzel, as Maximilian Harden

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 161

has reminded us, frequented it habitually. Even
today, while it may not rival the conspicuous or
magnificent establishments of this present era of ex-
travagance, it still gives for little money, in quiet
and comfort, one of the best dinners the ordinary
person may desire.

Before our day of modern beer-palaces, you could
name Berlin's most popular eating-places quickly
enough. There were swagger establishments, like
Dressel's, on the Linden; you took your coffee of an
afternoon at the Cafe Bauer, or the Kraenzler op-
posite, or the Victoria — all on different corners of
the Linden and the Friedrich — and you went in the
evening to hear the regimental music or the Italian
opera at Kroll's. In those years all the Mary Gar-
dens, the Cavalieris, and Tetrazzinis of the time
sang, sooner or later, at Kroll's. It was a private,
a cozy, establishment. Like Kempinski's, it was
another way of spelling Berlin. Most of it just a
garden outdoors, with tables and chairs; the indoor
opera-house was small and intimate. To-day it is
an annex to the Royal Opera-house, and under the
imperial dominance; yet it does not seem to mean as
much as once it did. In those years when it flamed
with uniforms and with the amazingly ugly gowns of
the blonde maidens of Berlin it was an essential part
of that essentially provincial life. That life spelt
Kroll's, and Kempinski's, and hearing Henrich
Boetel crack his whip and his non-existent voice as
the Postillion of Longjumeau in the theater on the
Belle-Alliancesstrasse. It meant illuminations, or
Lortzing's "Czar und Zimmermann" at the old
Flora. It meant the first German emperor. . . ,

1 62 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

It was from a window of an uncle's house on the
Belle-Alliancestrasse that the writer saw the three
men who in our time have been German emperors,
leading each his regiment; William, his son Frederick
William, and the present ruler. All three together
on the same day.

In those days the shopkeeper of Berlin was the
rudest in the world; he is but little better to-day.
Politeness in a Berlin shop meant that the proprietor
was from Vienna. Shrewd shoppers liked to pene-
trate over beyond the royal stables and seek bar-
gains in the old town ; to-day the old town, the whole
district around City Hall, is as modern as anything
else in Berlin. Neither Tietz nor Wertheim's nor
the Western Warehouse existed then. The Berlin
department store of to-day leaves little to be desired
even by the most devoted victim of the American
"meet-me-at-the-fountain" habit of spending the day.
The street urchins of Berlin used to yell "Oder
Kaehne!" whenever they saw American footwear
approaching; their quick wit soon found the com-
parison to those specially broad-beamed barger
that ply the Oder and its canals. In those days the
German officer was paramount. To the officer the
outer world in mufti was simply non-existent; if you
were in civil clothes he simply did not see you. The
characteristic jest of the period summed up the Ger-
man social situation in its entirety; an officer, enter-
ing an outdoor resort which is simply overflowing
with a mass of people, but all in mufti, screws his
monocle more tightly in his eye, surveys the scene
from on high, mutters "Not a soul in the place," and
goes disgustedly away. Something of a contrast,

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 163

you see, to the American attitude, occasionally ex-
pressed in an expulsion from places of public resort
of United States sailors or soldiers in uniform. To-
day the officer is not so paramount, and it may be that
the American refusal to take him at the official Ger-
man valuation has had as much as anything else to
do with that.

EVEN in those early days the Column of Victory
was subject for the Berliner's jibes. The only
maiden in Berlin, so went his joke, udie kein Ver-
haeltniss hat" was the one at top of that column.
So soon began the Gallic tendency of Berlin wit.
To-day Berlin is more Gallic, in its wit and sketch,
than Paris itself. Berlin makes fun of its ruler's
taste in art; it derides the row of pallid ghosts in
marble called the Avenue of Victory, supposed to
represent the Hohenzollerns and their ancestors;
it derides the fountain showing Roland Von Berlin;
it derides everything. Especially the Berlin cabman;
he will just as soon slang you as take your money,
and his is a wit that cuts deep.

It was a city of magnificent mistakes in marble that
the restaurateur, Kempinski, knew in his later days.
They were plastered all over the town, from the old
castle, to the Brandenburger-Thor, and throughout
the Thiergarten. People used to dine as far away
as the Zoological Garden just to get away from
them; besides, the music there was always good, and
the provincial world of Berlin liked to stroll up and
down there and be commented on. White marble
is a passion with modern Berlin. Even the most
material apartment houses manage to look white;

1 64 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

one wonders how they keep so clean. In clean houses,
clean streets, Berlin can teach the rest of the world.
In much else it leads; in urban postal facilities, espe-
cially of the pneumatic tube system; in electric tram-
ways; in police paternalism, and much else. To feel
that paternalism you must live, rather than visit,
there; you may rebel at first; but it all works for the
protection of the individual after all.

American arrogance or indifference has beaten
down much of the old provincialism that clung to
Berlin. Like every other town in Germany, Berlin
had a Civic Association for the Welfare of Strang-
ers, which, like the village improvement societies of
New England, has value chiefly as it improves the
villagers themselves. For, having Kempinski's, hav-
ing the pictures of Arnold Boecklin, having innumer-
able riches material and artistic, the Berliners long
remained the utterest villagers in Europe. Yet to-
day the town is like Chicago, like New York, or like
Boston, rather than like any other town in Europe.

Especially it is like Boston in its pursuit of culture.
Suppose we consider that a little.

II

THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE

To the question: Where is Culture? a hundred
towns cry "Here!" Yet the world sees daily mil-
lions of people struggling, crushing, hurrying, breath-
less in pursuit of — what? Culture? How explain
that paradox? Boston has culture; Berlin has it;
Athens had it; and so on down the endless list; and

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 165

yet a vast human mob pants breathlessly in search
of it!

Grim determination on their faces, they brave
bankruptcies, ocean journeys, privations, so they may
follow that will-o'-the-wisp culture. Let us salute
them, heroic, unreasonable, futile as they are; they
represent the dreamers, the idealists of the world,
however practically, however pathetically, however
ridiculously they engage in their chase. Life, lib-
erty and the pursuit of culture, so do they read the
articles of their life's creed.

There is not a tiny American hamlet that has not
its worshipers at the shrine of culture. They call
it by its name familiarly, not knowing that in so do-
ing they offend it; it refuses to obey orders. Yet
they put up a stern chase, across continents and
oceans. You find these seekers in the galleries of
Florence, heating the cool corridors of the Pitti and
the Uffizi by their zeal and speed; you find them
amid ruins of Roman and Saracen in Sicily; and you
find them wherever modernity seems seething most
hotly. It is a mad scramble to achieve culture; the
middle-class mob of all the world is groaning and
aching after it. Trying to put finger on every letter
in the culture-alphabet. Whereas culture is a butter-
fly; put your finger on it and it is dust, it is gone.
Culture remains intangible, simply stuff for conver-
sation. All newspapers, all criticism, might cease to
exist; that would not matter as much as if people
ceased talking about art. The moment that happens,
art ceases to exist.

Where Berlin and Boston touch is that they both
insist upon compulsory culture. Boston has never

1 66 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

had the compulsion to drink wine (Weinzwang —
impossible of direct translation), as have certain
Berlin restaurants; but for decades it has had the
compulsion to culture. For decades it has been the
custom to suppose culture safely sequestered in the
chill Bostonian air. The legend of Boston culture
was fine and full of color; it is perpetuated by plenty
of records in description of literary and artistic
groups, colonies and enterprises. Once the legend
was fact; the arts actually existed there; arts sub-
servient neither to dollars nor to ladies. There were
men of letters; among others Emerson, refrigerated
philosopher. Periodicals of artistic importance bore
the Boston imprint.

In the history of culture Boston antedates Berlin;
Boston began in the days when they burnt witches.
Even to-day, if you produce anything inexplicably
beautiful in the arts, you are burnt at the stake in
America. Puritanism, the dollar, and the ladies, to-
day control American culture. Only the ladies read,
go to the theater, and — here is the point to be re-
peated— talk about art. Talk. Stuff to talk about,
the arts are no more than that. That is the case in
Berlin and in Boston.

To-day, of the culture legend there remains little
in Boston save the compulsion, enforced upon whoso
would be counted as an individual in the fashionable
and intellectual world of Boston, to believe in cul-
ture as having stepped out of the legend into the
present day. You may be able to find evidences of
nothing but a curious disposition toward putting new
labels on old dogmas — New Science, Christian
Thought, and similar devices — yet if you would not

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 167

be ostracized by Boston, you must do your share in
furthering the hum of culture. Daily Boston strives
to bring dead culture to life again, though many have
never noticed that only the legend lives; they still
believe in culture itself. . . . One must be
armed in the arts; one must be able to name the
names. The appearance of the thing must be there;
or it's all off in Boston. . . . Money does not
matter much; but you simply must believe in the
culture legend.

IT is in Germany, in Berlin, that the pursuit of cul-
ture is, if possible, more fierce than even in America.
Hugo Muensterberg, of Harvard, for a time fur-
thering the Amerika Institut in Berlin, had found,
he told me there not long ago, a greater interest in
culture in Berlin than even in Boston. It was a lit-
tle discussion upon that matter which started this
closer inquiry into some of the humor and pathos
of this pursuit in which Germany races with Amer-
ica, and in which all the nations take part.

In our young country, its own history none too
long, its antiquity but fragmentary, its heritage of
intellect somewhat casual, there is plausible reason
for the blind worshiping at the culture shrine. All
the students, the teachers, the women who are not
happy, the men who are idle, mingle to make the
American crowd that annually crosses the ocean seek-
ing culture.

Before them looms in general the huge continent
of the older world, and some special attraction for
each of them. These to Baireuth; those to Oberam-
mergau; here is an exposition in Turin; there one in

1 68 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Rome, or Dresden, or Brussels; one year is a corona-
tion in England, a "Rosencavalier" in Dresden, a
horse show here, an international tourist show there.
There is always something where items in culture
may be gathered.

Baedeker serves as first primer; then come the
advertisements of the steamers and railways and
hotels, and the Societies for Increasing Traffic, as
the German phrase has it. From one spot they speed
to another, sapping the honey from a cathedral here,
a picture show there, a new opera here, a pantomime
there.

There is much that is pathetic in this frightful
scramble. Life is so bitterly short, the wealth of
wonders in the world so great! Not at a hundred
miles an hour could even a millionth of the things
worth seeing, hearing, knowing, in the world be ac-
quired by any mortal. Yet relentlessly the chase goes
on.

There are those who delve into the antique ; those
who devote themselves to merely the newest emana-
tions; those who attempt both. All fail; culture es-
capes them all; it is not to be had for the pursuing;
it chooses to abide here or there ; but it is never to
be compelled by this or that lure, this or that feverish
zeal.

Always we are before the problem which the
Africans put into their saying that "the morrow
never comes"; culture may once have been and may
again be, but it never is. Some have it, not knowing
they have it; nor does it insist on the acquisition of
knowledge on the part of those it may choose to
favor ; it is something finer than mere learning. Yet,

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 169

utterly intangible as it is, culture charms its devotees
into a ceaseless pursuit.

CONSIDERING only the very newest of the manifes-
tations in the world of art, of the theaters or of let-
ters, the pursuit of culture has indeed reached one
of its most curious phases in Berlin. To Berlin the
American culture-crowd should point, if they would
see the hum of it at the liveliest. In Berlin culture
has reached the point where it fills a circus with
thousands.

Heretofore culture has moved small groups, clubs,
societies, village reading circles, round-the-world
excursions. In the art of the theater especially the
select crowds have had the loudest word for culture;
Ibsen flourished first in small, intimate theaters;
Porto-Riche, Wedekind, Schnitzler, Galsworthy,
Barker, Shaw, and the rest were instrumental chiefly
in giving small audiences in small theaters the feel-
ing that they, and they only, were the elect in culture-
land.

Always, in the theater or in paint, there were the
alien geniuses who were welcomed, largely, again, in
order that a chosen set might preen themselves upon
the possession of more culture than their neighbors;
in this way served such men as Sorolla, Zuloaga, and
Cezanne. . There are always critics, in every depart-
ment of art, who live entirely upon a genius for pro-
moting the alien and neglecting the greater artist
around the corner. Where would be the profit in a
culture that all men might enjoy? Where is the vir-
tue in proclaiming Jones, who lives in the same town,
a genius? A man who speaks the same tongue, who

1 70 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

was once of the same set, an ordinary fellow like
the critic himself? No, by culture, no!

But Berlin has gone all this little affair of cliques
and circles one better. It introduced culture in
wholesale portions, culture at a circus, and culture
by special trains. Daily Berlin looks in its glass, and
is sure it sees Culture, culture. An industry, nothing
less, is Berlin culture ; and unfortunate they who have
no stock in that G. M. B. H. — Limited Liability
Company.

No, America has not had anything like that yet.
Of Baireuth and Oberammergau one could declare
that it was largely America which dominated in the
culture-seeking crowd. But Berliners, and Berliners
only, filled the specials that went once a week to
Dresden the first season to hear the "Rosencavalier,"
and it was Berlin itself that filled the circus where
Max Rheinhardt was tickling its appetite for pic-
turesque culture. Berliners thought nothing of sit-
ting for four hours to see Rheinhardt's production
of the second part of "Faust"; their physical en-
durance stops at nothing in pursuit of culture.
Goethe to-day, and Von Hoffmansthal to-morrow;
Berlin talked of "Oedipus" in the intervals of talk-
ing of "Faust" and "Sumurun."

The last-named pantomime, Japanese in subject,
was by Fredrich Freska, a German, and all the critics
praised Herr Reinhardt's arrangement of scene and
music as the greatest triumph in the history of mod-
ern pantomime, and Berlin thrilled in pleasure, and
certainly of its being indeed the center of culture.
Yet what was new in the scenic management of

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 171

"Sumurun" was as much Gordon Craig's as Rein-
hardt's, and those who knew of a culture not bounded
by the city limits of Berlin knew also that Stanis-
lawsky and Soulerjitsky of the Art Theater in Mos-
cow, that Fritz Erler, Julius Diez, T. T. Heine, and
others of the Munich Artists' Theater, and that the
men of the Dublin Art Theater, had prepared the
way which Reinhardt now cannily and spectacularly
follows.

Herr Reinhardt, genius in theatricalism as he is,
is still a greater genius in fooling the culture mob.
He has started the imitative appetites of the culture-
mad on both sides of the Atlantic. Tragedy and
pantomime and even individual cabaret talents like
that Berlin amalgam of Guilbert and George Robey,
Claire Waldoff — he juggles them all for the amaze-
ment of those dullards who had not realized that
there was as much money to be made out of culture
as out of anything else, if you knew how to go about
it. If only the promoters of the New Theater in
New York had known enough to engage Max Rein-
hardt, their scheme of plutocratic culture might not
have failed so ingloriously.

Whether Americans would sit four hours one day
and four hours the next to see a "Faust" is another
question. But no strain is too great for the true
Berlin pursuivant of culture. An entire day to Dres-
den is not so much if you compare it with the months
Americans will devote to a coronation or Baireuth;
yet it was no slight physical strain; a special train
down, then three of the most tedious acts of libretto
and music you ever listened to, and then a special

172 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

train back to Berlin, the whole journey blue with
talk, talk, talk of music, Strauss, Von Hoffmansthal,
"Rosencavalier," culture, culture.

Yes, whisper it not in cultured ears, the "Rosen-
cavalier" story is the dullest thing Von Hoffmansthal
ever wrote, and went near to killing the Strauss music
in its prime. The first act has noble music; the sec-
ond begins well and ends well, and is deadly dull in
the middle; and the third act, but for the last ten
minutes, would damn any opera that had not been so
magnificently advertised as necessary in the pursuit
of culture. Von Hoffmansthal is never so sad as
when he tries to be comic; the passages intended to
work funnily in the "Rosencavalier" are of an im-
penetrable melancholy.

But, whether the piece was comic where it meant
to be sad, or sad where it tried to be comic, what
cared Berlin, so the "Rosencavalier" spelt culture?
Not to have heard this or that supreme detail in
culture, this or that triumph of Strauss, or Rein-
hardt, is to bring upon yourself the scorn of all
Berlin.

Upon the hard Prussian faces, hastening along the
streets of Berlin all day and all night, you find two
expressions written; one says, Prosperity; the other
says, Culture. You can hear the hum of both,
audibly, like the sound of distant riot.

In Boston or Berlin, in Vienna or Paris, the flying
squadron in pursuit of culture must never stop for
ironic reflections. It must not pause to think, para-
doxic as that may be. It must hurry, hurry on, lest
culture escape.

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 173

YET culture is not, if it exist at all, a mathematical
concept, nor yet, as in Berlin, an incident in a profit-
able enterprise. It is an affair of the emotions; it
is a spiritual atmospheric effect. And if one is to
feel that effect, those emotions, it will not be in Ber-
lin, but in Vienna. At which, of course, the North-
Germans will smile ironically. Yet I venture to say
that if a flying squadron of the culture army were to
visit the town of Professors Koloman Moser, Hoff-
man and Otto Prutscher, their work in architecture,
interior decoration, jewelry, and every possible form
of applied art would be admitted beautiful enough
to make even the most ironic observer declare that
if culture indeed exists, it must be in the town where
such lovely things as those are fashioned.

Truly a curious thing, culture. In London they
are long since beyond it, though they have never had
it. In the time of Wilde there was a set which called
itself the Souls; but today it has ceased to be worth
London's while to pretend culture, save only where
a German flavor obtains in this or that new set. Cul-
ture is simply taken for granted, as is everything, in
England. It is bad form to declare things plainly;
one simply doesn't do that sort of thing. In London
they are as far beyond culture as in Berlin they are
above good manners.

Does culture, then, indeed exist? Ah, no two
answers to that will ever be alike. Is it, perhaps,
never more than a legend? Only those can answer
who have felt, who have breathed, fully and pas-
sionately; those who live more deeply in life itself
than in make-believes.

174 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

III

ART APPETITE COMPARED WITH BOSTON

THAT culture is ever acquired, or even that cul-
ture exists, we may doubt; but the tremendous extent
of the pursuit of it, of the appetite, let us say, for
art, it is impossible to deny. It may not be without
interest to examine, a trifle ironically, or at least com-
paringly, certain characteristics through which that
appetite expresses itself in some of the larger art
centers of our time, especially Berlin and Boston.
For these two have much in common when it comes
to art appetite.

THE casual visitor to Boston must always be tre-
menduously impressed by the continuous thronging
to the Museum of Art which occurs when any famous
loan collection is on view. In the proper Boston con-
templation, from within rather than without the
gates, that is, of course, no more than an incident in
a farspread appreciation of art which has since al-
most legendary times been taken for granted as typi-
cal of the town. The existence of such art interest is
not easily to be doubted after noting some popular
expressions of it, which come to little less than a
mobbing of the Museum.

What notably impresses always in the Boston pro-
cession of enthusiasts struggling toward this or that
half-hundred of reputed masterpieces in paint is the
completeness with which this town's huge business of
educating and cultivating artistic and aesthetic ten-
dencies has made its way into the very warp of the

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 175

plain people's lives. In the Boston mob which is
content to shuffle for forty minutes, imperfectly com*
fortable and insufficiently swept by ozone, through
marble halls, for the sake of one roomful of pic-
tures, the alien observer, intimately acquainted with
the habits of other great galleries, finds features of
no small interest. Mingled with the obvious mem-
bers of that huge colony which is in Boston to learn
this, that or the other — a colony recruited from the
entire American continent to an extent which those
persons who live by figures alone must surely long
since have computed as constituting an enormously
valuable asset in the Boston fortune! — are persons
of every conceivable sort and condition, in a variety,
in short, approached only in Munich or Berlin.
Aside from the more well-to-do, who are to be ex-
pected at such occasions anywhere in the world, there
are always, in Boston, such numbers of the plain peo-
ple, of all ages, as will be found under like circum-
stances in no other town in America. The cynical
explanation would, we may presume, be that the
student colony so spreads through the town that
hardly a single household is untouched by its life and
its talk. And it is talk, as I asserted on a previous
page, and as this present contemplation of the sub-
ject is more specifically to point out, that chiefly
spreads the public interest in any art. It is what
people say of this book or that play which determines
its fate.

THE town to which Boston comes nearest in the
extent of its student-colony as a factor in the general
art appreciation is Berlin. There, too, whether it

1 76 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

is in the Museum, the National Gallerie, the annual
show of the Kunst-Ausstellung, or even the little
gathering of secessionist stuff on the Kurfursten-
damn, you will find the avid, garrulous student type
mingling with the ordinary citizen of every degree.
There, too, you will find the patter and chatter of
the studios and the students pointing the way for the
comment of the less expert burgesses who find it as
necessary to prop their station in life with conversa-
tion about art as with conversation on politics. Ber-
lin, like Boston, counts its students of music, of art,
of almost every form of aesthetics and science, as
among its most valuable features. Entire house-
holds, entire quarters of the town, are swayed by the
necessities or desires of the student population; there
are innumerable "pensions" where the ordinary bar-
barian in Berlin must needs train his stomach to ac-
custom itself to most amazing hours for meals in
order that this or that "class" in music or paint may
be accessible to the dominant student members of
the household. Perhaps in Boston, too, a certain
tendency toward dyspepsia is similarly to be ac-
counted for.

In Munich the art students dominate the scene.
At certain seasons of the year, of course, they
dwindle in significance before the gallery-devouring
tourist, who treads from the Pinakothek to the
Glyptothek, and thence to the Glas-Palast, with firm
and grim determination. The Anglo-Saxon tourist,
indeed, typifies, when abroad in the picture galleries
of the world, the keen appetite for art of your proper
Bostonian. The color-stuff that is to be the day's
fare for eye and mind must be swallowed ; no matter

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 177

how large the dose, how fine or how coarse, it must
be swallowed; as to mastication, assimilation, diges-
tion: these things must take their chances. There
are certain duties that one owes to one's station in
life, to one's country, to one's town; the first of these,
in the detail of pictures, is to see as many as possible.
The point is: we went through every gallery in Eu-
rope ; or, we have seen every collection that has been
in the Museum of Art since it was opened!

To reach the conclusion that there is a fraction
of spuriousness about the art appreciation of the
majority one has only to widen one's own experience
of the galleries of the world, and to keep one's ears
open to the stuff that is talked about pictures. Surely
there can be nothing more piteous to the real lover
of Florence, its cool and lovely opportunities for
lingering, individual and precious enjoyment of its
countless treasures, than to observe those sad pro-
cessions scurrying through the Pitti and the Ufizi
following the rapid commonplaces of this or that
uninspired guide ! They troop like sheep following
a harassed shepherd; they are hurried from master-
piece to masterpiece; they see with the eyes of a flock,
not of individuals; they listen to the opinions of
others; they are swallowing, swallowing, just as all
Boston swallows, just as swallow all Iowa, and Chi-
cago, and all the thousands of Americans who read
the constitutional phrase as "life, liberty and the pur-
suit of culture." They swallow enough to provide
themselves with certain first principles of conversa-
tion; and there you have what they are really after;
whether they digest anything is something they are
willing to leave to luck.

178 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

It is in the average conversation about art, in what
people say while they stand in the galleries, or while
they sit at dinner afterwards, that you will get your
test of whether people, in this or that quarter of the
world, do their own thinking about art. Mixing
with the more or less fashionable throng in Burling-
ton House in any spring of any year, what you will
hear the Londoners and provincials saying will
hardly convince you that the average English are
concerned much beyond what is the most attractive
portrait of the most "fashionable beauty" of the sea-
son, or what is the "anecdote" on canvas which the
leading journals have declared the picture of the
year. In Philadelphia, every spring, you will find the
curious spectacle of what is perhaps the nearest ap-
proach to a representative annual "Salon" in Amer-
ica without any element of real Philadelphia in it.
The exhibition simply happens to be in Philadelphia ;
but the people who make up the visiting apprecia-
tion come from all over the East; Philadelphia itself
contributes nothing to the color or note of the crowd
in the gallery. In Florence, beyond the rapid gabble
of the speeding lecturers, the occasionally genuine
word of appreciation or understanding that you may
hear will not be in English. Nor yet in Munich, nor
in Berlin.

The gallery conversations of London have been
sketched so delightfully by F. Anstey and Pett Ridge,
among others, that one need do no more than say
they have all those features in repetition of what
other people have printed or said which distinguish
human conversation everywhere. Whether a plain
cockney is expounding the obvious in analysis of some

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 179

painted story by Mr. Collyer that is as unimaginative
as a page of Euclid; or a Bostonian student, over-
sophicated in phrases and unilluminated by candor,
is going into raptures over a certain picture because
it is by a famous painter and depicts a famous woman
for whom a famous man made a fool of himself —
the insincerity and parrotry of the stuff that is talked
about art is much the same all over the world.

WHAT is needed to purge the majority's adolescent
art appreciation of much of its insincerity is some
candid barbarism. It is not, to-day, any fine aborigi-
nal, individual expression of opinion, however bar-
baric or unorthodox, that you will hear in any gal-
lery in America, from the Boston Art Museum to the
Corcoran in Washington. The stuff you will hear is
the voice either of the backpsch, sickly with senti-
mentality and imitated dilutions of it, or of the would-
be sophisticated chatterer of phrases caught from the
studio or from literature. Cant and not candor is
in the air. For one note of genuine opinion, naturally
expressed — and how quickly the note of an indi-
vidual, of spontaneous sincerity, may be discerned
out of a welter of imitative chatter! — you will hear
ten which are nothing but the backfisch version of
Tomlinson's uye have seen, ye have heard," etc. If
Boston be that town on the American continent most
sophisticated in matters of art, a town fuller than
any other of the grim pursuers of that will-'o-the-
wisp, culture, then Boston, too, needs an infusion of
forthright barbarism more than any other.

The barbarian in art may be simply an untutored
individual spontaneously expressing natural sincerity;

i8o VAGABOND JOURNEYS

or he may be one who has triumphantly reached bar-
barism after nausea from too much sophistication.
Lorado Taft is of the latter class. But so you be
genuinely barbaric, your road to barbarism need not
matter. What matters is your courage for frank-
ness. The sophisticated barbarian reaches his eman-
cipation after much sloughing off of old habits of
imitation and cant and patter. There comes a mo-
ment of illumination ; suddenly the eyes that have for
years seen no painting without a veil of other peo-
ple's phrases, printed or spoken, open to the value of
individual interpretation. To see the thing itself, not
the thing through the study or the studio ; that is the
rare sight. The barbarian, as we have seen, has
courage, in the Uffizi of Florence to prefer to all the
other starred and mob-scarred corridors that room
where the artists of our own generation have shown
portraits of themselves, Millais, Herkomer, Sar-
gent and all the splendid rest, while the led sheep
upstairs imbibe the pseudo-literary, pseudo-artistic
commonplaces of a perfunctory phrasemaker at
wholesale rates, passing from one all too "storied"
canvas to another. Both in Boston and Berlin,
where the backfisch is most relentlessly in dominance,
some fine barbaric frenzy, compact of humor and
humanity, should overthrow these pestilent literary
attitudes toward art.

Have you ever thought how strangely the human
trend has chosen to differ in its attitude toward the
theater and toward paint? Where nine out of ten
people in a theater never know the names of the
playwright, but only of the actors, in a picture gal-
lery the names are everything. "Ah," says the back-

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 181

fisch from Iowa, or Vermont, or Chicago — or from
Pasewalk or Danzig or Pasing — -"Lady Hamilton!
How perfectly sweet! I could look at those eyes
all day. A Romney — how perfectly fascinating!"
Item: the name of the artist assured her it was safe
to gush; item: the name of the sitter added the scrap
of historic and literary value needed to complete the
proprietary of our backfisch joining the chorus of
the other intellectual backfisch.

The backfisch has been too long triumphant. In-
ternational she is, as well as immortal. Fourteen
or forty, she swells the great oratorio of other peo-
ple's opinions about art. She is not so much a hu-
man phenomenon as a state of mind ; as Von Buelow's
tenor was a disease. She finds a landscape by Corot
"attractive," just as in Baltimore they declare a new
frock or a young man from New York "attractive";
the Corot may be an abortive daub, but she only
knows that it is "a Corot." Barbaric courage to
like a picture without having heard the name of the
painter is not hers. She is wedded to her catalogue;
she feasts, like Beau Brummel as the late Richard
Mansfield showed him in that last fine scene in the
Calais garret, "off the names of things." It is the
backfisch who protects the experts who write of art
in terms of all the other arts, making confusion and
mysticism deeper than ever. It is she who has pro-
duced the "programme writer" in criticism of music,
and the Chopinesque critic of paint.

If only the backfisch would keep still! But that
is just it; she dominates the conversation! She has
neither ego nor cosmos, but she has a voice. The
true lovers of art seldom tell their love. That finest

1 82 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

authority on art, ancient and modern, in all Florence,
Riccardo Nobili, might have you in his house for
months, and you would hear no word from him about
art.

To impress the others, the lodgers on the Pots-
damerstrasse or Newbury Street, that is the aim and
end of too much that is prattled and chattered of
art to-day.

Let us whisper to the prattlers of phrases, who see
miles of canvas through literature only, that many
wise men who have foreseen the future in the for-
tunes of art, have been barbarians. George Moore
was one of the most barbaric who ever looked at a
painting; and if you had been as barbaric as he, and
realized Whistler before the parrots and the fash-
ionable did, you might be rich to-day. That hack-
neyed remark concluding: . . . ubut I know what
I like" has too long, to suit a Gelett Burgess whim,
been called a bromide; it is nothing but a battle-cry
of barbarism that should be flung abroad more than
it is. To go no other person's way, but your own;
to echo no praise though a million artistic gospels
point the path — that is true barbarism. Because the
others babble in one generation of Cezanne, Ma-
tisse, Van Geogh, Gauguin and the post-impression-
ists, in another of Sisley, or Manet, or Slevogt, that
is no reason why one should pretend an opinion
about them when one really has none at all. "I do
not give one solitary hang" is part of the barbarian's
candid armor. The barbarian is not a vandal, as is
the modernizer of old Florence. The barbarian
need not be bourgeois; need not mean the statues of
Begas, the taste of a Hohenzollern or a Guelph.

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 183

The French, most sophisticated in art, can be the
most barbaric.

To see things as they are, without glasses furnished
arrogantly by experts, or by literature, that is to be
barbarian.

IV

NIGHT LIFE

ONE more comparison remains, as we examine
Berlin's right to rank among the world-towns. We
have looked into cooking, and into various facets of
that glittering moonstone, culture. But it is not of
her countless feeding troughs, her garish beer pal-
aces, her efforts to form a world-embracing Combine
out of culture, that Berlin, in her heart of hearts, is
proudest. No, the one domain wherein she pretends
to indisputable eminence is Night Life. To con-
sider her right to that eminence we must consider
also some of her rivals.

An amazing discussion goes back and forth across
the English Channel every now and again. Like
most discussions, most arguments, it is rooted in
wrong premises, reaches false conclusions, and
leaves all the disputants believing exactly what they
did before. The question is, for one thing, whether
London is dull, and, for another, whether Berlin is
less dull. Emphasis, of course, goes largely upon
the detail of night life.

Suppose, from this safe distance, though armed
with all the necessary facts, the experience, and the
susceptibility to emotions, that we look at the ques-
tion more widely than if it concerned only London

1 84 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

and Berlin. For, in any comparative observation,
it becomes necessary to range Paris and Vienna with
those others. To include Brussels, Budapest, Naples
and the rest would lead too far; national and racial
characteristics and differences can be sufficiently
gauged in the quartet just mentioned.

FOR London to have tried to defend herself from
the charge of being dead and buried after a com-
paratively early midnight hour must ever be a proof
of an insular immunity from the irony of facts. All
of us who know our London at all know that how-
ever much we may be on the inside of life at its most
sophisticated, its most autocratic, we are neverthe-
less bounced on to the cold street when the County
Council hour strikes.

We may be sitting with all the potentates and
powers at the Savoy, the Carlton, the Ritz, the Berk-
eley, or any of their peers, but when that hour ap-
proaches the servitor's whisper, "Five minutes, gen-
tlemen!" falls upon the just and the unjust alike, and
at the minute itself the lights go out, and there is
nothing for us to do but follow suit.

And then, once upon the street, where is the night
life of London? Ah, ask of the winds! You might
as well; it will profit you just as much as if you asked
of the policeman on the beat. Belated taxis toot
past; one or two forlorn relics of that fine romantic
era typified by the hansom cab go jingling by; some
amazed and dazed aliens wander about Piccadilly
Circus seeking for the livelier vices and the more
brilliant glitter of their own towns; the real Lon-
don is dead. Stray creatures, some in rags, and

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 185

some in all the elaborate black and white splendor
of evening masculine regimentals, wander homeward
on foot, some of them seeking food and hot coffee
in — and here you have the sufficient comment upon
London's nocturnal state ! — the cab shelters, equiva-
lent to our American owl lunch wagons. A hawker
selling chestnuts, or hot potatoes; a bird of prey or
two smelling of patchouli ; the rest is silence and deso-
lation. At the County Council hour everything goes
dark and dumb.

What, then, has London in the way of gayety after
candlelight? What can visitors find for amusement
after their hard work of sightseeing in daylight?
Well, they may dine to-day in thirty times as many
cosmopolitan restaurants as they could in the London
of fifteen years ago, for one thing. If London to-day
is but a gray place for those on nocturnal pleasure
bent, it is a very glitter of color compared to what
it was fifteen years ago.

The old Londoner, of course, regrets the passing
of his cozy old town; he sees the riddling of it by
tubes, the increase of gorgeous and florid eating
places, the passing away of old and dingy corners
wherein people had for a century fed badly for no
other reason than that their forefathers had done
so — he sees all this with distress and anger. But
the stranger within the gates may bless his stars that
he does not have to depend for his food and drink
upon that now vanished London.

The London of to-day, as most of us know, is as
new a town as any of the others in the world. To
find there the old, to-day — well, none but the hard-
iest Americans attempt it; the Londoner himself has

1 86 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

given it up long ago. To repeat, then: one has a
good range of places wherein to dine, of theaters
wherein to sit for the bulk of the evening, and of
places wherein to sup after the play. But with that
the tale has been told. If you want a glittering frolic
which you have imagined to yourself under the title
of "London at Night," you will have to end it as
you began it, in your dreams. You dine, you watch
the play, you hear music, you sup, and then — off to
bed with you. By order of the County Council.

Let us bless the County Council. The most timor-
ous mother might let her tenderest fledgeling boy go
unprotected across the West End of London in the
small hours of the morning, from Mayfair to Bel-
gravia, from Bayswater to Whitehall, from Kensing-
ton to Marylebone, and he would be immune from
the din of gayety, the infection of merriment, the
sound and air of pleasure. This is not to say — alas
for the plans of County Councils, and all other hu-
man devices to sterilize the human tendencies in the
race ! — that the aforesaid milkwhite youth might not
run into some dismal, drab, or dirty iniquity in the
modern Babylon. Man is not less vile there than
elsewhere; nor woman, either; over essential human
frailties no County Councils have jurisdiction. For
those who take their pleasures sadly and darkly not
even London is without temptation after midnight.
But from nocturnal gayety the town is immune. The
Goddess of Pleasure pulls the curtain at the Coun-
cil's closing hour. The wayfarer is left in outer
darkness. If he feels he must needs be a gay dog
until dawn, there is nothing for him save his home
or his club.

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 187

Even the clubs — well, this is not the place for a
dissertation on the different air of clubs in England
as against that in America, but no man in his senses
yet went to a London club for small-hour gayety.
It is true that the new Automobile Club is become
seriously a competitor of the existing public supper
resorts, and that eventually some pleasurable after-
math on supper may be permitted there; but we are
not all motor-minded. Again, a segregated gayety,
in four walls, in even the most splendid of clubs, is
not what most people mean when they speak of this
or that town's night life of pleasure.

As for Paris, its night life is a tale that has been
so often told that no good American can be supposed
ignorant of its features. The details of such a night
in Paris, as every foreigner permits himself at least
once in his life, are become so common that there is
hardly a hamlet in the remotest region of Suburbia
or the backwoods where the mention of "gay Paree"
will not arouse reminiscences in the meekest-seeming
habitant. Let the subject of Paris come up in the
unlikeliest crew of human beings, on land or sea,
around the village grocery store, or the smoking
room of the most luxurious ocean liner, and at once
the gamut of gayety will be reviewed again by old
and young, the bored and the ambitious. Students
of art have their version of it; the indiscriminate
tourists and sightseers have another, and keen gour-
mets of sensation have another. That night life in
Paris provides a feast for all appetites is admitted.

Literature has recorded all the courses in the feast,
long ago, and the only chance for new retouchings

1 88 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

of the subject comes in the changes that the passing
years bring over the nocturnal scene there in Lutetia.
The records of Henri Murger, of Du Maurier and
of Aristide Bruant, if we name no others, declare
the glitter of the nightly pleasure in the City of Light.
The name of Aristide Bruant recalls, of course, one
of the first of those nocturnal cabarets, now so com-
mon, which became places where art and literature
met on common ground, for profit, and the pleasing
of the visiting public.

The routes across the map of Paris night life
are many. To take them all, to know the landmarks
on all the ways, would need a lifetime, and many
lives have been wasted in the search. You have, as
even in dismal London, innumerable places where to
dine, innumerable playhouses. Then come the many
places where a sort of bridge is formed between
theatrical entertainment and nocturnal gayety, places
the names of which are by now so familiar in New
York that they are more and more supposed to bring
profit through domestic application: The Folies
Bergeres, the Jardin de Paris, the Alcazar d'Ete, the
Ambassadeurs, and the Marigny. Some of these are,
for summer, partly outdoors; some, like the
Marigny, are always inclosed. There is always the
show on the stage, and the show in the promenade.
Beauty of face, of form and of frocks and frills is
likely to distract from the actual stage the attention
of the non-linguistic visitor.

Morals we may leave to moralists; our concern is,
now, merely to observe whether the obvious features
of Paris by night are attractive. We have already
seen how the legend of Maxim has paled; that is true

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 189

of many similar Parisian legends, yet we would be
indeed curmudgeon, indeed bilious of view, if we dis-
puted altogether the nocturnal charm of Paris. She
is light, airy, well caparisoned, amusing, pleasurable
to the eye and ear. She sparkles.

When the great establishments that pretend to a
more or less theatrical entertainment on or near the
grand boulevards empty their throngs upon the night,
the business of nocturnal pleasure has, if you know
where to go, only begun for Paris. But, mark you,
you must know where to go. On the boulevards
themselves a hush and a dimness may come ; you may
think all Paris is going to bed. As a matter of fact,
it has gone up to the Hill of Martyrs, to the Place
Pigalle, the Place Blanche, or even higher up, to
where once was the old mill and where the studios
were. You may walk if you have youth in your
veins, or you may just say the right word to a cab-
man, and presently you will be where night never dies
in Paris.

The names change from year to year; but most
folk know the Rat Mort, where -you may dine (not
badly, as I remarked in my chapter on Paris) amid
peaceable appearing burgesses on the street floor,
and later, on an upper floor, find all manner of
mixed and fascinating dancing going on between
the cataracts of champagne or tisane; most know
the Abbaye, with its mirrors, its overdressed
women; its paid dancers, and its supercilious servi-
tors ; and most have been to the Moulin Rouge either
when it was sheerly a dance hall or when it was ,i
music hall, or when, as lately, it is a cross between
the two.

190 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Then there are numerous cabarets, all based upon
the idea of Bruant, or of the Cafe Noir of Rodolphe
Sails. There is the place called Heaven, and that
called Hell, and that of Death. To astonish you,
to give you a sensation, to quicken into some sort of
action your jaded nocturnal nerves, is the object of
all these places.

In one they used to shout an obscene word at
you as you entered; if that had never happened
to you in your life before, you were at least the
richer for a sensation, however unspeakable your
opinion of the welcome might be. In this place
artists of the stage, of paint, of music, or of letters
conspired to your amusement ; in another, you your-
self might be dragged into doing something for the
amusement of the others. You never quite knew
what might befall you, as long, at any rate, as you
kept your youth and your enthusiasm.

Is it that we grow old, or do the joys themselves
grow stale? Or does Paris indeed not keep to her
old pace of providing nocturnal novelties? For, to
tell the honest truth, the route of night life in Paris
is to-day a trifle littered and shabby, like the streets
of Paris herself. The taint of the tourist is a little
too plain upon it all. New places come and go, but
pass quickly into the familiar repertoire of every
sightseer, until all are finally equally nauseous to the
discriminating.

The several phases of this nocturnal gayety begin
to wear the air of a set scene upon a stage. You
almost expect to hear some announcement for all
the world to :

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 191

uWalk up, walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and see
how gay Paris is at night."

The moment this label becomes too plain, the thing
itself is off. Yet Paris, however dingy she may be-
come as a mistress of pleasure, still keeps the quick-
ness of her wits, and one thinks that the near ex-
ample of Berlin will serve to show her the horror of
too garishly displaying nocturnal life as a tangible
article for the world's desire. For, in Berlin — but
we go a trifle fast. No last word has yet been said of
night life on the left bank of the Seine.

Much of the legend and the literature has now to
be forgotten. Fickle in this respect as in all else,
Paris is forever changing the fashion in cafes and
restaurants. One year the students went here, the
actors there, the journalists there; if you came the
next year to seek any of them in those places you
would find another set entirely.

Then, too, there is that frightfully abused term,
still overmuch in vogue with the ignorant — the Latin
quarter. There has been no such thing, outside the
literature produced in English by the uninitiate, for,
lo, these many years. There is, instead, the Ameri-
can quarter, and the Students' quarter. The line
between the two may be something like the equator;
it is enough to say that the American quarter lies up
near the Montparnasse station, and the Students'
over to the left, as you turn your back to the river.
Ascending the rise along the Boulevard St. Michel
you are traveling steadily along the ways worn ro-
mantic by the legends of the Latin quarter; to-day
it is the quarter of the students. You pass famous
resort after resort, the Golden Sun, the Francis the

1 92 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

First, the Scarlet Jackass, the Pantheon; you pass
the gardens of the Luxembourg, and you reach the
Bal Bullier. Not to-day what once it was, the Bal
Bullier, even as, on Montmartre, the Tabarin, is too
staged and arranged an affair. Yet — if you are
young. . . . To dance into the small hours with
the first best or worst girl whose step suits yours ; to
warm the corner of the cafe where once Verlaine
drooled absinthe and rhymes; to watch the dawn
come glimmering into the leafage of the Luxem-
bourg, to catch the scent of night mists, of the Seine,
of tar, of dust, that go to make the Paris essence; to
begin with a cup of chocolate at the Cafe du Dom, to
feast one's senses on lights, and music, and genius
and woman the whole night long, and then go, in
the proper Paris fashion, and break one's fast in a
creamery the size of your hat — that is to have been
young.

To each of us, so we have arranged our lives prop-
erly, Paris must eternally spell a part of youth. Hag-
gard and wan herself, often enough, letting herself
get unkempt here and ragged there, she yet succeeds,
in spite of everything, in reviving a sense of youth in
all the world that visits her. We must be very tired,
be very captious, if we deny her charm, or find it
gone. Yet, that even in our time a change has come
over her charm, that to-day it takes more determina-
tion to find it and to exert it, there can be little deny-
ing. You hear this spoken wherever cosmopolitans
assemble. Philosophers of pleasure have phrased it
thus : that Paris must sink even lower than she has
sunk to-day before she will rise again to the splendid
gayety of her empire days.

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 193

MEANWHILE, for those who look for the plain
label "Night Life Warranted Gay," there is no doubt
that the most important place has long since ceased
to be Paris. Berlin is the place.

Such night life has never before existed in the his-
tory of the world. Never before have such determi-
nation and fervor gone to the making of it, such
grossness of appetite gone to the enjoyment of it.
In preparing nocturnal pleasure and in wallowing in
it the Berliners are unsurpassed. They made up
their minds, some years ago, that they would make
their town the capital of pleasure for the whole
world, and, by the almighty dollar and the lettering
on the package, they have done it ! None could mis-
take this tremendous activity, this feverish hurrying
and plunging into whirlwinds of change, of color,
of splendor, and luxury; this is Pleasure, Pleasure;
this is Night Life. One wonders that, like every-
thing else in Berlin, night life has not been turned
into a G. M. B. H. — a limited liability company.

Let us approach this extraordinary manifestation
of German energy soberly, and with some attempt
at beginning at a beginning. The stories of nocturnal
gayety, as they touch the other towns, have mostly
been told before; the story of Berlin's night life, the
most amazing tale of all, has never yet been properly
told. This present historian has seen it begin out of
nothing. For some years after '71 Berlin was
merely the capital of Prussia, trying to assume im-
perial dignity. There came material prosperity.
Germany grew rich. The same change that came
over its letters, bringing them up into the most mod-
ern directions in the late '903, came also over Berlin's

194 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

appetite for amusement. In its heavy-handed man-
ner it determined to be frivolous. The hours for
lights, for music, for the semblance of liveliness grew
later and later, earlier and earlier. The change in
the last five or six years has come at a pace astonish-
ing even those to whom the town was as familiar as
their own house.

Time was when the Cafe National, on the Fried-
richstrasse, represented the culmination of deviltry
that Berlin could show in the class of the Cafe du
Pantheon on the Boulevard St. Michel. To-day the
National is a dingy affair that none but the returning
ghosts of other decades, or the Lost Soul of Mar-
garethe Boehme would think of entering. Berlin is
now on heights of luxury the National had never
dared to attempt.

Even six or seven years ago it was easily possible
to spend a full night in Berlin without being bored.
The hours for the play were early; you supped after-
wards at Dressel's, or Kempinski's, or the Traube,
or even Frederich's on the Potsdamerstrasse, and
then you went to a cabaret. There were plenty of
them, started in imitation of the French article, but
eventually having some decent reason for existence
in that they furthered a domestic art of music, of
poetry, of the stage, and even of pantomime. You
heard parodies of local application, burlesques, songs
and stories somewhat near the bone, and music that
was quite as worth memory as what you heard in the
first-ranking theaters. Indeed, men like Oscar
Straus, Victor Hollander, Paul Lincke, and others
wrote countless cabaret songs; the cabaret helped
them to their later operetta fame.

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 195

The hours of the cabaret were announced as from
1 1 until dawn. Only a few years ago a popular farce
in Berlin, based upon the cabaret mania, was called
" 'Till Five o'Clock in the Morning." You could go
from one cabaret to another, always finding different
artists, and a different, individual style to the estab-
lishment; the London trick of an artist "doing a
turn" in half a dozen establishments a night was not
in vogue. The names of the cabarets were such as
"The Hurdy-gurdy." the "Roland von Berlin," 'The
Bad Boy," and the like. They had their ups and
downs; you found different ones each year; but the
idea of the thing itself did not die down. It bridged
effectively that period of hours between supper and
the dawn, and the Berliner had determined this pe-
riod must not be wasted in sleep.

TO-DAY there are places in Berlin which surpass
anything ever before attempted in the history of pub-
lic pleasure. They call themselves dance palaces,
using the French form for the label. The Parisian
model for pleasure still serves the Berliner; the
Parisian legend of nocturnal pleasure still has its
power, but in the material evidences Berlin has long
since surpassed Paris. One of these Palais de Danse
will suffice, in description, for our purpose.

You enter past as many flunkies as in an actual
palace; you pay an entrance fee, if you are male, by
no means small. As for the ladies — let us be polite,
even in Berlin, where politeness is eccentric ! — the
ladies find it profitable to subscribe to a season ticket.
You proceed up stairs and halls that are marble and
gold and everything that glitters and blazes, until

196 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

you find yourself, eventually, in a vast hall the like
of which has not been found since Babylon. Vast
is the floor space, vast the height of the room, and
stupendous the garishness of splendor about you
everywhere. Nowhere an artistic style, but every-
where a solid, colossal fever to impress. It is the
splendor of drunkards. Drunkards drunk with their
own prosperity, mad to shout that prosperity at the
world. Golden nymphs and cherubs reel about the
ceiling; thousands of lights produce an intense glare;
jewels and wine shimmer and sparkle all about you.

Upon a depressed portion of the floor couples
dance to the oversensuous music. Watching the
dancers sit the others, men and women, at countless
tables, small and large. Champagne pops every-
where; the "wine openers" of Broadway, watching
this Berlin scene, would suddenly realize their own
inefficiencies. Always, too, it is a French champagne
that you see; the Berliner, in this sort of resort at
least, is as cowardly about ordering his domestic fizz
as is the American. The point of the whole business
of nocturnal pleasure in Berlin is that there must be
more money spent than has ever before been spent
on nocturnal pleasure in the whole world.

Everything is there that money can buy, more than
you ever thought possible. Every material form of
display and luxuriousness greets the eye, on the floor,
the walls, and the ceiling. The women's frocks cost
fortunes; the men are spending fortunes. Withal,
the women could fascinate no refined taste, and the
men would be tolerated for not one second by any
finely constituted woman. They move, dancing,
drinking, and eating, amid all this Babylonian splen-

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 197

dor; the men in the semblance of butchers, the women
patterned for cooks.

The rings on the men's hands, the Parisian robes
on the women, do not hide the essential ugliness in
them. After all, there are some things you cannot
buy. Here, we must confess, is the supreme triumph
of materialism in our own time, of materialism seek-
ing pleasure. Had Babylon been banal, it must have
been like the Berlin of to-day; let us keep our legend
and believe that Babylon had never a megalomania
that robbed it of good taste.

Berlin, for all the hours from dusk to dawn, shows
the teeth of its grim determination to be gay. It has
laid on luxury with a trowel, first in this dancing
palace, then another. You can continue from one
of these to another, until the sun is high hung in
heaven. You will see the same people; they, too, are
making the nocturnal procession. It begins to grow
sad, this route of pleasure ; you see the perverted men
who can no longer achieve pleasure though they
nightly spend a fortune on it, and the women who
play the bitter part of unrewarded players in the
comedy called Night Life.

All around you cafes are open; even if some close,
the bars, English or American so-called, or labeled
Frenchwise, Tabarin, or Maxim, or Hohenzollern,
never close at all. Nor is this confined to the central
region. In every direction, near every residential
nucleus, these bars and all-night resorts flourish. In
some, too, even the dullest observer will find that
pride in perversity which Berlin no longer takes the
least pains to dissemble.

Berlin, for garishness of its night life, for the

198 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

amount of money spent, has surpassed the world.
There is nothing like it anywhere, nor has there been
in our time. To the Metropole Palais de Danse,
in Berlin, Maxim's of Paris is like a dull and dingy
hole in the wall, and Giro's at Monte like a petty
beanery. Like the feverish zest of the Berliner to
surpass the modern records of nocturnal gayety we
have seen nothing in our time. And, in contradis-
tinction to the business of pleasure in most other
towns, certainly in Paris and in New York, the Ber-
liners themselves play the leading parts; the night
life is not simply an enterprise conducted for the
amusement of Russian grand dukes, rich Americans,
or gentlemen from Oskaloosa. No, Berlin does most
of it herself; she has determined to lead, and she does
it, not only in providing the place and the suitable
surroundings, but the leading participants.

Yet the irony of things has ordained that for all
his energy, all his money, the real article of pleas-
ure shall not come to the Berliner's lure. He gives
one of the most imposing imitations in the world,
and one, doubtless, likely to impress all save the
very finest temperaments. The average American,
applying his familiar standard of money spent, of
obvious splendor achieved, may not miss the beauty
that is not there, the intangible charm that has been
utterly destroyed by all this patent pursuit of
pleasure.

He will simply see that nothing on Broadway,
nothing in Saratoga, neither Chamberlin's in
Washington nor Canfield's, neither this million-
aire establishment nor that, was ever like the places

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 199

he will see in Berlin. "Rome — on a drunk !" said a
genial critic once of the Chicago Court House and
its architecture. The phrase were better applied
to the interior architecture of some of Berlin's noc-
turnal palaces.

Berlin's Chief of Police who, as I have already
recorded, did not know the identity of Tilla Durieux,
presumably also knows nothing of the night life of
Berlin, otherwise fairly famous in the world. If
he did, he might have found it as important to check
certain tendencies in that night life recalling the
Round Table and Eulenberg, and the Harden case,
as to censor pages appealing only to men of letters.

But perhaps there is an admitted policy of empire
in all this. Perhaps the supreme night life of Ber-
lin is to make evident to the world at large the com-
mercial supremacy of Germany. However that may
be, it is a fact that Germany is living fully up to its
means, is as reckless in riotous living, as avid to
spend more than its neighbors, as ever Americans
have been accused of being.

Berlin has all the externals. It is useless to deny
that. Its conduct of the material business of a gay
night life is unrivaled; the thing is a paying con-
cern. The world at large, after all, is impressed
by material evidences; Berlin has more and greater
evidences of nocturnal gayety than any other mod-
ern capital. Yet there are so many different sorts
of people in the world! Some, for example, find the
thing itself, gayety, pleasure, whatever others may
choose to label it, in circumstances where labels, ma-
terial evidences, suitable surroundings, etc., are ut-

200 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

terly lacking. There are, will you believe it, after
you have read of the brilliance of Berlin by night,
people who find their gayety in Vienna !

YES, in the ancient Kaiserstadt, the old, last
citadel of aristocracy and feudalism in the Western
World, some find an air, an atmosphere, intangible
like an escaping melody, that holds for them the
thing that men call pleasure. An insuperable diffi-
culty confronts whoever would describe the Viennese
article of night life; since it is largely atmospheric,
an affair of the emotions, of the tastes. To declare
that there are innumerable cafes that keep open to
the small hours ; to say that the central part of town
dies early into darkness and silence, to record the
names of the cabarets, the Hell, the Heaven, the
Fledermaus, the Siisse Madel, the Max & Moritz —
all this is but to utter the inessential names of things
and to give no hint of the heart of the matter. Like
culture, this is an affair of the emotions, an effect
not material, not tangible, not to be labeled, atmos-
pheric.

It is futile to list the places you may go to at night
in Vienna; no listing gives away the secret of its
charm. Just so is it futile for me to try to spell that
charm for you. What mortal yet, in any art, save
that of personality, gave charm a voice or form?
No, a list will tell us nothing adequate. We may
point out that it is possible to go to the Burg Thea-
ter, or the Opera itself, or to the Theater des Wes-
tens; to go to the Cabaret of the Hoelle, where as
good a playwright as Ludwig Thoma is occasionally
represented by one-act sketches ; or to a huge variety

BERLIN, NEWEST OF CITIES 201

house like Ronacher's, or to the Apollo to hear Roda-
Roda tell his inimitable stories. There, in the Roda-
Roda number, or if Frank Wedekind is mumming
something of his own, we gain an experience not
possible often or in many places, for Roda-Roda is
playwright and humorist of the first rank, author of
the most successful farce in years, "Feldherrn-
huegel," forbidden in Austria on account of its satire
on the Austrian army. Wedekind is now of world-
wide notoriety. We have no English or American
equivalents to such distinguished men of letters and
the drama appearing before the huge audiences of
music-halls. Or, again, we may hear at the Max &
Moritz a tender ballad of that fine dead poet, von
Liliencron, a ballad called "Muede," recalling the
days when the Ueberbrettl was young in German
lands. Strolling down the Hoheturmstrasse, on to
the Pragerstrasse, you will find lesser resorts, dingier
people, less presentable pleasures. But the essential
pleasurable Viennese charm, how will you encompass
that?

You will do it exactly as a gunpowder expert the
other day put his five-hundred-fingered hand upon
Poetry in trying to describe what it was. You will
do it just as a child catches a butterfly that it may
win its gorgeous hues, which perish as they are
brushed by the finger. Night life in Vienna has the
quality of all Viennese life, it has a curious twilight
of sentiment and charm that some few artists, not-
ably Schnitzler, have put into words, but for trans-
lation into an alien tongue, for alien comprehension,
it presents difficulties too great to be overcome here.
Old, established on long outmoded, useless feudal

202 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

things, Vienna still holds for beauty in its life, its
women, its externals, a peerless place in the world.
To describe the charm of its night life is to describe
the charm of a beautiful woman, the fascination of an
affair with a charming damsel — the Siisse Madel
immortalized by more than one Viennese song and
story.

i

To be young, and in Paris; to be sentimental, and
in Vienna; to enjoy the sight of money spent, and in
Berlin ; to be dog tired and go to bed, in London —
there are some sorts of night life abroad for you.

CHAPTER EIGHT

LONDON

PARIS for the gourmet, Berlin for the roys-
terer, London for the man of fashion; so
runs our cosmopolitan summing-up. If
time and again we have denied London's
title as a capital of good cooking or nocturnal gayety,
it is time., in all fairness, that we examined that in
which she still excels. From the vantage ground of
Bond Street and Hyde Park let us observe London
and its habits; let us even look on at so typically
British an event as a prizefight held, so that we may
not narrow our vision over precincts too fashionable,
in the heart of Whitechapel; let us see what can be
done to escape a London Sunday, and to distinguish
England speech from American. By then, without
having infringed at any point upon the patents of all
the Baedekers, without having moved constantly in a
procession of sightseers, we may have gained as inti-
mate an understanding of the greatest of English
towns as others acquire by looking at the Tower of
London and peering into Dickens-land.

BOND STREET AND ITS HABITS

IF we arc to credit streets and avenues with char-
acters of their own, with moods, some of them freak-
ish and some of them typical, then the distinguishing

203

204 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

characteristic of Bond Street, as of our own Fifth
Avenue, is its quality as a thoroughfare for fashion.

Like the world itself, streets are what we make
them. The philosophy of Schopenhauer may easily
be otherwise phrased by saying that everything de-
pends upon the beholder. There are doubtless peo-
ple who consider Fifth Avenue merely as so much
real estate, or Bond Street as so much history. Those
considerations would doubtless be valuable enough;
but it is as fashionable thoroughfares that these two
arteries of London and of New York make their
paramount appeal to the general.

If you will observe Bond Street or Fifth Avenue
long enough and carefully enough, you will see all
the people who are worth seeing in our Western
world. As has been said often enough of this or
that corner in Paris. You will see the fashionables
and you will see the fashions. These latter, as to
the cut of the clothes and the individuals within
them, may change; just as the sand particles in one
corner of Sahara may not be the identical ones to-
day that they were yesterday; but the fashionable
procession continues eternally, issuing from the
earliest of our recollections and pointing into a
changeless future.

Though your philosophy be merely that of man
or woman of the world, calculating only the imme-
diate and the intimate, without any thoughts of ab-
stract or altruistic doctrine, to watch the Bond Street
parade, upon a day of Springtime, or of St. Luke's
summer, is one of the most diverting of pastimes.

JOHNSON asked us to walk with him in Fleet

LONDON 205

Street; and a pleasant legend shows Beau Brummel
condescending to stroll with us down the Mall. Shall
we, then, translate those two eminent personages
into the twentieth century, and take a stroll down
Bond Street together?

Let us suppose ourselves to have entered Bond
Street from Piccadilly. If we are of one persuasion
we may just have rounded Stewart's most dangerous
corner, where tea and muffins lure the unwary male;
if we are of a cannier breed we will be blind to every-
thing but a passing bit of gossip about Scott, the hat-
ter, on the other corner, and how his daughters have
married. From thence, strolling slowly westward,
those who know their Bond Street will find many
stopping places. One art gallery after another.
Yonder are the galleries of the Wertheimers, whose
family the American painter Sargent helped to make
conspicuous, or who served to make Sargent famous
— you may put the case as you please. Here are
galleries where occasionally you may see the cari-
catures of Max Beerbohm, depicting renowned per-
sonages of the day; and where, now and again, the
caricatures by Spy of Vanity Fair may be seen.

THESE latter are of value to our present subject;
they are sartorial as well as satiric; and persons with
leisure to make a study of masculine apparel in Eng-
land will find it worth while to observe not only the
actual street pageant, but these extremely instructive
character and costume portraits. The subjects of
"Spy" colored sketches have been all the men of
social, sporting, political, military and even clerical
importance of the time. To such an extent has this

206 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

fact been appreciated the world over that some
American tailors have been in the habit of placing
"Spy" sketches in their windows from time to time.
Quite aside from the study you may thus make of
the essence of good dress in England, this gallery of
portraits is vastly useful to the stranger, inasmuch
as it forms a quick key to the identity of the many
notabilities he sees daily. Hardly any great Briton
is excluded from the gallery. Among its best dressed
men, by American standards, have been Colonel
Lawrence James Oliphant, Mr. Alfred Harmsworth
and Mr. George Alexander; the last as Aubrey Tan-
queray. The actor wore a blue lounge suit, button
boots and a blue ascot tie, faintly dotted with red.
Among the frock-coated gentry, one recent season,
was Prince Francis of Teck, whose coat was buttoned
very tight to the ngure in a fashion now much
seen both in frocks and cutaways. His silk hat was
tilted back at an angle that in any less exalted per-
sonage would proclaim the bounder. "Spy's" por-
trait of the Earl of Clarendon, then Lord Chamber-
lain, showed him in a cutaway, black ascot, wing col-
lar, yellow wash-leather gloves and a violet bouton-
niere. In the tying of a four-in-hand some English-
men seem to fancy a very ugly type of carelessness.
Witness the portrait of Viscount Valentia, of Ox-
ford, in the Vanity Fair gallery. His red four-in-
hand was so loosely knotted that the collar stud
showed plainly between it and the collar. Millions
of Englishmen copy this hideous sloppiness. Vastly
preferable is the tropic carelessness affected by such
a man as Sir Claude Macdonald, of Chinese fame.
In white flannels, with a Panama hat in hand, tall,

LONDON 207

lean and blond of mustache, he was the picture of
cool, clean comfort.

Reflections more serious than sartorial inevitably
stir at sight of that Bond Street gallery. It is of
certain male portraits of John Sargent, for instance,
that I always think, as I pass this Bond Street point;
portraits that definitely marked him as a painter of
men. These were the portraits of Lord Ribblesdale
and of young Wertheimer. As life stands out from
cold stone, so these canvases stood out from those
about them. They marked extremes, not only of
person, but of type; and they must ever remain
notable documents in the history of those vital
changes which our generation has seen in England.
To say nothing of their accentuating, once again
(as was so repeatedly pointed out in my Munich
chapter) , how imperishable is the artist's commentary
upon his own time, its arts and its personages.

Here, in Lord Ribblesdale, was the old aristocracy
of birth and breeding; there, in young Wertheimer,
the new world-power, brains and money. At all
points the contrasts were absolute; as Lord Ribbles-
dale was handsome and haughty, Wertheimer was
handsome and haughty; yet a world lay between the
two. With his small mouth, fine aquiline nose, thin
face, Lord Ribblesdale typified the British peer at
his best; he was in riding togs, and the Englishman
is always at his best — indeed, he seems perilously
near being well-dressed at such time only — when
dressed for outdoor sports, riding or driving pre-
ferred. Ribblesdale's face showed pride, careless
consciousness of the prestige the ages have put to
his credit, and a scorn for the majority opinion.

208 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Wertheimer's showed pride also, the pride of money
and of the skill that shall bring others to worship
such power. A young face, dark, with slumberous
eyes, and a touch of sneer in it. The eyes tell of
power and brain and cunning.

As studies in male attire these two pictures of
Ribblesdale and Wertheimer tell the entire story of
the British male's dressing of to-day. Wertheimer
is immaculate. Too much so, perhaps. London
holds very few men who dress so well as this. His
coat and trousers are black, the coat a short, or sacque
cut. The waistcoat is buff, and at the neck is a white
stock. Mr. Sargent knew what he was about when
he had both these men choose the sporting attire.
In Wertheimer's case it is suggested only in the
stock; Ribblesdale is in full riding regalia. Where
the fit of Wertheimer's clothes is precise, immaculate,
Ribblesdale's simply hang about him. The clothes
are of tan, the breeches are wrinkled countlessly;
the two lower buttons of the waistcoat are unbut-
toned; a large black stock is awry and under the
right ear, and the black topcoat drops over the
shoulders anyhow. Ribblesdale is too conscious of
himself to care about clothes, or, rather, the misfit
of them; he is Ribblesdale, a riding peer, and the
lesser man may be immaculate for all he cares. That
is what Sargent has put in this frame, at least. Wert-
heimer intends that his clothes shall impress as much
as his money and his brain.

These two Sargent portraits, of such opposite
types of man, are triumphs; they tell pregnant
stones; they reveal the gist of an epoch. They
signal the old that is passing, and the new that is in

LONDON 209

power. With J. C. Snaith's novel "Broke of Cov-
enden," and with Galsworthy's "The Country
House" and "The Patrician," these Sargent can-
vases belong in the history of the Decline and Fall
of the British Squire.

MOVING on up Bond Street, away from Wert-
heimer's, on the right comes one of England's most
famous perfumers, and just around the corner is the
Vigo Street entrance to the Burlington Arcade, where
you may see some of the newest and most expensive
of the fashionable haberdashery of the moment, and
where, in certain afternoon hours, it is quite impos-
sible for you, even if you are an American, to walk
with your ladies. On the left you have passed a
smaller arcade, where once was the bookshop of
Leonard Smithers, who came into history as having
been publisher to Oscar Wilde.

At the bend, where Bond Street is narrowest, and
where, if you are afoot, you have to be very careful
lest milady's carriage throws some scornful London
mud upon your clothes, was Long's Hotel, one of the
places where, in an earlier decade, all the bloods, as
well as the brains, of London were wont to look in
for a nip; that was part of the duty they felt toward
the town that kept them alive and amused. Not
far from there was the Blue Posts Tavern in Cork
Street, where, until just the other day, devotees of
the grilled bone could worship and be satisfied.

All about lies tailorland. If all else were stilled,
if the carriages and motors and carts fell suddenly
silent, and no steps resounded on the pavements, no
voices filled the air, we may imagine that whole re-

2io VAGABOND JOURNEYS

gion, around and about St. George's, Hanover
Square, from Conduit Street to Brook Street, sibilant
with the snap and click of shears, and with the polite
voices asking, "And will you have a ticket pocket out-
side?" Tailors, tailors, everywhere.

For ladies there are plenty of alluring places here-
about, we know well enough; all the great French
and American and English costumers have their
places somewhere within reach of this radius; yet
some of these are but agencies, but local depots, but
filiales; whereas for men this is the ultimate sartorial
Mecca. It is a large question, this, of the supremacy
of the Bond Street tailor, or the Fifth Avenue tailor,
and will never be settled as long as men's tastes dif-
fer; but it is not to be disputed that nowhere else in
the world is there so solid a cluster of the men who
make our outer men. They cling together, as if feed-
ing upon the very air of competition and proximity.

A fashionable, struck suddenly with aphasia, with
loss of memory, and so unable to recall the name and
number of his proper tailor, need not suffer so long
as he has reached this region; let him follow his nose,
and the door of one tailor or another would surely
open to him.

Bootmakers, too, plenty of them. But no man
of common sense goes near them, unless he is an
American of the hopelessly Anglomaniac sort. The
famous Parisian maker of featherweight trunks is
here, and the drapers who display genuine Harris
tweeds in their windows, whence it is doubtful if any
ever issue into actual suits of clothes. A few doors
up Conduit Street is one of the well-known Starting
Price bookmakers, with rooms as splendid as an

LONDON 211

uptown stock broker's office in New York; nor is
this the only point at which these differently labeled
enterprises meet in the human scheme of things.

And so, presently, we are in Oxford Street, with
Marshall & Snelgrove's facing us, and the newest
of all the London department stores, Selfridge's,
looming up just to the left, beckoning all Americans.
There, on Oxford Street, is stuff for all purses, all
classes; there the stream is that of all-inclusive hu-
manity; here, on Bond Street, at this particularly
fashionable hour, the stream is sheerly aristocratic,
and when rags appear there we feel the contrast all
the more shockedly. Let us, for our present pur-
pose, turn our back again upon the greater human
flow, and consider simply the thin if brilliant lane
of fashion that ebbs and flows through Bond Street.

It is a constant procession of well-dressed men
and women. Those who are not well dressed are
in a conspicuous minority; you feel, instinctively,
that, in the season at least, it is an insult to the street
and to yourself not to be well dressed on Bond
Street. Occasionally a carriage stops by the curb,
while the traffic halts; occupants converse languidly;
sometimes a hat is lifted from the tiny trottoir;
there is chatter of where one is going that night, or
the next. "No; we are off to Paris; London is really
too dull yet; only provincials and Americans are in
town." A human ruin in paint and powder, crow's
feet and a wig, is saying to the corsetted beau beside
her, with a tragic attempt at coquetry, "Ah, it was
so triste after you went!" Splendid girls, the color
of Devonshire cream and roses; ponderous dow-
agers, impressive with lorgnettes and supercilious

212 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

noses; clean-shaven, red-cheeked men, perfectly
caparisoned — pass, and repass. Constantly people
bow and speak to one another; all London, and a
good deal of the whole Anglo-Saxon world, are out
walking and driving.

The horseflesh is superb ; the driving is no better,
perhaps, than on Fifth Avenue, but its obstacles are
greater, in that Bond Street is not, after all, much
wider than Maiden Lane, and yet must take at a
certain time of the day all that is fashionable in Lon-
don traffic. One may laugh as one likes at the su-
perhuman stiffness of the grooms and the coachmen
in Bond Street; after one has seen the ludicrous
mockeries of English horsiness that obtain in most
of the other European countries, one is forced to
admire both the calm, immaculate immobility and
the skill of the British horsefolk. The carriages of
many types are all of an essential solidity; you may
see some American runabouts in Hyde Park, but not
in Bond Street.

TIME was, and not so long ago, when the fash-
ionable London male, who looms so large in the Bond
Street procession, was built upon what seemed a
changeless pattern. High silk hat, frock coat —
these were the unalterables. Trousers might run
this way or that, toward gay or grave ; the waistcoat
might betray the boldness or the timidity of its
wearer; there might, or there might not, be spats.
Dead of winter or tropic summer made no differ-
ence; the Englishman and his tall hat went stolidly
through both. Some of them knew their folly, yet

LONDON 213

it seemed too deeply rooted for change. Andrew
Lang, while still the period was Victorian, wrote of
the idiocy of man, tall-hatted and frock-coated,
sweating through the summer day on which the cow,
more sensible, chose some cool shady pool wherein
to stand immersed.

To every youngster who knew London in that
late Victorian day the town seemed filled with a mil-
lion sombre digits walking unsmilingly in long coats
and heavy hats; an umbrella made the only occa-
sional addition. One such youngster, mot qui parle,
in whose schooltime London revealed itself only as
he sat in a fourwheeler between King's Cross Sta-
tion and London Bridge half a dozen times a year,
all Londoners seemed to have been born in frock
coats; and if he thought of death at all, he would
have fancied Londoners as frock-coated in the Great
Beyond. Bond Street, to be sure, meant nothing to
that boy.

Bond Street had not yet become so great a mill-
race for Anglo-Saxon fashion as it is to-day, just as
London itself, huge though it was, had not yet be-
gun to cater to the stranger, unless he was himself
an Englishman. London was still a terrible place
for the cosmopolitan's feeding; it offered him beef
and potatoes, and not much else. If one lived in,
say, the Midlands, or the North, one came "up to
town" for a week, or a month; one stayed at some
dingy private hotel near the Embankment; one went
to the theaters; one shopped a little; and with that,
one had done one's duty. There was no question of
a great international artery of the world's fashion-

214 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

ables being visible in the great West End; that was
not down in the guide books, nor did any of the
elders seek to illumine our generation.

Those elders may have gone to merry and per-
haps unmoral routs where now the Trocadero feeds
a section of the theater throng; they may have fore-
gathered at the Star and Garter; but, if so, they
told us nothing about it. No, it was not until after
the Victorian period that Bond Street really entered
upon its present paramount allure; it was not until
the end of that period that the reign of the frock
coat and the high hat seemed even so much as
threatened.

An American in London only fifteen years ago
invariably felt a wave of relief as he saw a soft hat,
for then he knew another American was approach-
ing. To-day you may see all manner of hats in Bond
Street; the Hombourg hats, so-called, presumably,
because they came from Tyrol and not Hombourg;
tweed hats like nothing in the world but frying pans,
and immaculate bowlers perched far back upon the
heads of glorious Bond Street dandies in lounge
suits. In the increase of the latter combination you
may find the real rival to the frock coat and top
hat convention. The London tailor, patterning after
the Fifth Avenue model, has finally turned out what
we call on this side a sack suit that completes a man
as well dressed as any who ever robed himself for a
wedding.

Time was, too, when English fashionables could
be heard audibly to declare, in Bond Street, with
patronizing tone and surprised manner, that Ameri-
cans were "always rather smart/' as if it were, some-

LONDON 215

how, a miracle that we did not appear clothed in the
leaves of the forest. That time, you see, is gone;
by showing Bond Street how well it was possible to
cut the lounge jacket we of Fifth Avenue have by
now almost routed the frock coat and top hat.

We know, of course, that there will be always
those who will wear them, since that style best real-
izes their sartorial character; there will always be
frock coats, even outside of Brooklyn, just as there
will always be funerals and weddings ; but the point
I make is that, at long last, a century of British con-
vention has crumbled when, to-day, the Bond Street
exquisite who parades his long coat and his high hat
appears somehow outmoded, rococo.

AN impression still lingers that the only season
for London and Bond Street is the spring. As a mat-
ter of fact, autumn is really the season of London
for the English. London for the Americans is an-
other matter altogether. Just as most Americans
get their impression of Paris from the Paris of be-
tween June and September — a Paris void of its
proper soul — so have they for years imagined that
"the season" in London began in May and ended
some ten or twelve weeks later. But that is merely
a half-truth. If it is quite true that there are still
millions of people in Paris after the "grande se-
maine," so it is true that the season of fashionable
entertainments, of the opera, and of all the set forms
and institutions does fall into the London spring.
But the Paris of after the Grand Prix is a town
wherein Americans almost jostle one another, a
town whose real personages are all taking the air

2i6 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

or the water somewhere else; and the London of
the summer is a town wherein the big shops on Ox-
ford and Regent Streets mark their prices in dollars
and cents rather than pounds, shillings, and pence.

In the autumn much of this disappears. Bond
Street is no longer a parade of the obviously curious
and observant visitor; it is a street whereon, at this
season, the Englishman and Englishwoman reign
supreme. They may not be Londoners; they may
be from the North, East, or West of England, but
they are English; you hear it in their voices, you see
it in the way some of them wear their Paris frocks,
and in the way that others allow their English tailor-
mades to display the arrogance with which these
islanders can achieve the unlovely. Yes, London in
October is the London that the English love. It is
in the autumn that the real English "come up to
town."

Keep your eyes open and you will see this driven
home everywhere. If you have imagined that ebb-
ing of the American tides leaves London desolate,
you were never more mistaken in your life. The
shops, the tailors, the modistes, and the milliners
are never more prosperous than during a London
summer set into fall. The theaters, opening one
after another with novelties, quickly — with very few
exceptions — run into good business. The Row is
crowded every fine afternoon with personages afoot,
ahorse, and in carriages. The paddock at Kempton
Park is as instructive an exhibit for those alive to
the suasions of fashion and of beauty as any Ascot
that ever was.

Each year the St. Luke's summer of England be-

LONDON 217

comes more and more lovely, more like the Ameri-
can Indian summer. October in London has often
more tender days than June. So one cannot blame
the English if it is at this time that they like to come
to a London clear of Americans. Business through-
out England may be bad, and the condition of the
unemployed a vital, imminent question for the gov-
ernment to settle, if it can, yet with the Bond Street
Londoners everything is, superficially at any rate,
very well indeed. The people who keep the jewelers
and tailors and dressmakers going do not, you see,
care very much about the Suffragettes trying to rush
the House of Commons, or labor riots, or railway
strikes, or the violent speeches that are made daily
in the Park near the Marble Arch. The fine com-
placency of the well-to-do classes in England still
lifts these people above the woes of their less fortu-
nate mortals. They think, with Marie Antoinette,
that distress and poverty are doubtless there; but one
takes them for granted, like the smoke or the noise
of the motor buses.

As for Bernard Shaw, whether he has been lectur-
ing on "Political Laziness/' or announcing that he
does not wash, or wear a white collar, one dismisses
him as being "a rotten Radical," and one goes to
one's club and pretends an interest in the Balkans;
the Balkans are safe inasmuch as they are fairly re-
mote, and, despite their qualities as avenues for all
that is volcanic in European politics, have at least
the virtue that they cannot talk back to us and con-
vince us that in our safe and comfortable chairs at
the club we are talking unmitigated bosh. Mrs.
Pankhurst and her two familiars may drive down

2i8 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Bond Street in a fashionably caparisoned turnout,
bowing right and left in her efforts to attract the at-
tention of those whom the banner she holds aloft
may have left cold; but she does not convince us
that she is in the least different from all the other
notoriety-seekers who have flitted their brief mo-
ments across the modern limelight.

And so your real Englishman enjoys his London
and his Bond Street, when Americans no longer
fill the scene. Your real Englishman loves us Ameri-
cans, of course, but if you approach him shrewdly,
if you conceal a little the nasal nature of your speech,
he will admit to you that "I don't come up to town,
you see, if I can help it, until it's clear of all these
Americans, don't you see." Did not Bellamy the
Magnificent say the Americans spoil shopping in
London "because they will insist on paying cash just
to get the discounts?"

But the Englishman, we know, loves to grumble,
even when he is happiest. Grumbling, indeed, is
doubtless an element in his happiness, and if, even
in a wonderful English version of our Indian sum-
mers the Londoner still grumbles at our American
ways, we are but adding to the items in his happiness.

As to whether Bond Street or Fifth Avenue leads
in fashionable clothes for men, that is, of course,
eternally matter of opinion. The question is so
huge. Is it decided by the men who wear the clothes,
by the clothes themselves, or by the men who cut
them? All separate, equally engrossing details.
For my part, I believe the infinitesimally small frac-
tion of male fashion that at rare intervals takes the

LONDON 219

Bond Street sun to be the best dressed body in the
world; you may justly differ and vote for Fifth
Avenue.

The mistake about the slovenly dressing in Lon-
don is easy to make. The average Londoner is in-
deed sloppy; you may see the most abominable coats,
the most ill-assorted garments of every sort, in that
town; and, if you are not there in the right season —
nay, more, if you do not see even Bond Street in one
of its best moods — you may continue in the belief
that London men do not know how to dress. You
will see abominably turned-out men — one has long
since known London women to be sartorially hope-
less— who would be a conspicuous vice in any second-
rate American town. The number of shocking hats,
distressing trousers and shabby ties is equaled only
by the abominable boots to be seen everywhere in
London. When the average Londoner ties his four-
in-hand he likes to leave a gaping half-inch or so be-
tween the knot and the shirt-stud; the result is as if
he had dressed for an alarm of fire. But that is all
part of the burden the town carries in being a hive
so enmillioned; the average is necessarily very far
below the high exceptions.

Again, you may wait long, to-day, before you
find in London a conspicuous, admitted dandy. Yet,
there are always men more or less military in car-
riage whom it is not easy to mistake for anything else
but Guardsmen; when a tailor of that region has
done his best for such a British physique as that, then
Bond Street has something to show that, with all its
far higher average, Fifth Avenue must find it hard
to beat.

220 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

The American average, it is generally admitted,
is the best in the world. But it has this disadvan-
tage : so well dressed is everybody that it is quite im-
possible to tell the banker from the drummer, the
hotel clerk from the millionaire. We all dress well;
yet, unless we can add, too, the touch of individuality,
we might as well be turned out of one single slot.
. . . We resent certain forms of individuality, it
is true; yet, in proper relation to sensible fashions, it
has its fine qualities.

FASHIONABLES have, one believes, now emerged
from that despotism wherein any one dandy could
lead them. It is not so long ago since the pretense
was made that the First Gentlemen in Europe led
the masculine fashion; but to-day that is no longer
true. Every decade or so, you may recall, the fiat
was wont to go forth that slovenliness was to be the
order of the day. The Prince was pictured as ap-
pearing in a shocking coat, in baggy trousers, and a
disgraceful hat, the very picture of the Little Eng-
lander on the Continent. Tailordom would be one
great groan, but we can readily see that any person-
ages whose sartorial habits were constantly being
reported to the world might, from time to time, re-
volt or adopt such a ruse. The loungers of the
Bois, the dummies of the Linden, the regulars of
Bond Street, and the democratic fashionables of
Fifth Avenue would thus, every now and again, be
left to their own devices.

Yes, in those other decades, there were indeed
sad moments for all those dandies without a leader.
To be English was, as always, the aim of all the

LONDON 221

males in Europe ; and when the English leader failed
them, what were they to do ? One could fancy them
calling upon fate for a new Beau Brummel. But the
day for any one man holding that title, even though
he be a prince, has, one thinks, gone by. The world
is now too large and too broken into sets. To-day,
in New York, the secret of single leadership seems
lost. There are too many well-dressed men here,
and the standard is too rigorously quiet for any in-
dividual to excel.

There was once a Berry Wall, a Prescott Law-
rence, an Onativia, and even an Ollie Teall, but the
noise of their dandydom is no longer heard in the
land. He who to-day dresses conspicuously in any
particular ceases to be well dressed. Yet that is a
pity, if it is to mean the exclusion of any ever so faint
a note of personality. To dress their individuality
suits some men better than to compress them-
selves to a mode. Take out of our recollection
Whistler with his Parisian hat and reed-like cane, the
Hammerstein hat and the Augustin Daly hat, George
Francis Train with his white duck suit and his scarlet
boutonniere, Mark Twain with his pale evening
clothes, the red waistcoats of the Montmartre ro-
mance, the topboots of Joaquin Miller, and the
slouch hat and cape of Tennyson, and you take out
much of spice and charm.

Just a spice of such individuality it is, I think, that
has made the Bond Street man reach a little higher
mark than we of Fifth Avenue. Recall, again, those
caricatures by Spy. Again, London has introduced
into the domain of clothes the touch of humor, as
evidenced in the criticisms passed annually by an

222 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

organ of the tailoring trade upon the portraits in
Burlington House. When a painter fumbles his de-
piction of clothes, or when a sitter proves himself
slovenly in any detail, this aforesaid periodical
gravely comments upon these works of art strictly
from the sartorial standpoint. None of us on Fifth
Avenue has yet reached that stage of sartorial so-
phistication or critical humor.

Without character, finally, clothes may be perfect,
but they cannot be the proper complement of man.
We may have, here on Fifth Avenue, a more per-
fect average of male attire; we may have immacu-
lateness, but we also have a somewhat toneless mono-
tone, lacking all spirit, all hint of the individual.

In the region of St. George's, Hanover Square,
some victories for individual fashion may still be
won. Fashionables from Fifth Avenue, if they
know exactly what they want, may still convince even
the Bond Street tailor. The defeat of the frock
coat has somewhat humbled that person. From this
same region it is possible to extract the joy of the in-
ventor. Here, several seasons before they were seen
on Fifth Avenue, some of us slanged our tailors
into cutting the sack coat slashed wide open in front,
into using for such coats a double button looped like
a sleeve link, and into making them without linings
save of the skeleton description. Here we astounded
the shears fraternity by demanding dinner suits made
of dark gray rather than dead black. And here,
after having patiently listened to the tone in which
all these were marked as American "eccentricities,"
we had the satisfaction of seeing the Bond Street
exquisites similarly attired a season or so later.

LONDON 223

In the main, however, it is a give-and-take game
between Bond Street and Fifth Avenue; the one
copies only the best from the other. Many of our
Western absurdities of ultra pockets, turned-back
cuffs on coats, etc., etc., Bond Street will not have at
any price.

Neither of these two streets, however, in New
York or London, deserves such precision of detail as
falls into the tediousness of statistics or of prose ac-
cording to Butterick. We Americans have rarely
dared write of men's fashions at all; perhaps that is
one excuse for even so much in that direction as this.
In one weekly paper here on Fifth Avenue there was
once a writer who touched the subject, but he took
so offensively snobbish a stand as to become soon
enough supremely absurd.

Fashion for men must, at its best, ever find a level
somewhere between quiet common sense and indi-
vidual character. And both these may be seen at
their best in the Anglo-Saxon world in the fashion-
able processions of Bond Street and Fifth Avenue.

II

SEEN FROM A PENNY CHAIR

IF Bond Street is the main artery, Hyde Park is
the heart of London. Mayfair may have its splen-
did functions within doors ; potentates may have bril-
liant processions and pageants; Bond Street may
display its comedy of fashion; the most effective and
fascinating show is, after all, to be found in the
park.

224 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

The park, and the police remain for many wise
observers the finest things in London. These are
the London features which appeal most to the cos-
mopolitan of refinement, and many hardened Lon-
doners agree with this conclusion. One may live in
London all one's life, you see, and be quite ignorant
of the inside of Westminster Abbey, or the Museum,
or the many claimants to the site of "The Old Curi-
osity Shop." If you mention familiarity with these
details to any member of the tribe encamped between
Bayswater and Berkeley Square, you will elicit a
large look of surprise, as if to say, "What curious
creatures these Americans are!" But the park and
the police are the inescapable virtues of the town;
they appeal to the years and the months, not the days
and the weeks. One does not need to come into con-
tact with towers, abbeys or museums, since these
things pall upon all save those determined feverishly
to "do London in three days" ; but one is forced daily
upon the protection of both the park and the police.
And to get to the park you can seldom manage, in
an average crowded season, to get along without
the help of the police. So one may, before going fur-
ther, consider briefly the London police, the best, I
believe, in the world.

IN urban and suburban transit, London is still in
process of being rescued from mediaeval conditions;
the town's fire department is tragically behind the
times; but the police force, ah, there one can only
admire ! In the first place, they look like business.
All stalwart, staunch fellows, they not infrequently
make the average "Tommy" of the army look quite

LONDON 225

stunted. In looks only our own American policeman
equals them. The Paris policeman never looks any-
thing but sloppy, and his notion of how to control
traffic at crowded street crossings is enough to make
one shout with laughter. Nobody minds him, and
his attempts upon the speed of the Parisian cabby
only result in a slanging-match, at full voice, that
makes one imagine the entire French Republic is once
again about to dislocate its jaw. As a friend of mine
put it, the Paris policeman, at important crossings,
appears to be doing nothing but "looking pleasant."
Concerning the legend that if you are knocked down
by a cab in Paris it is the custom of the policeman
to arrest you and have you fined, I will say nothing
save that many Americans will go to their graves be-
lieving it true. The retort of the Parisian seems
rather far-fetched; it is to the effect that quantities of
notoriety or death-seeking people, having taken to
the habit of throwing themselves in front of speed-
ing cabs, it was found necessary, in order to protect
the insurance companies, as well as the general weal,
to pass a law to prevent such would-be suicides from
receiving compensation. It is this law that has, in
its working results, given rise to the foregoing Amer-
ican legend. But, as I said before, the Parisian ex-
planation is unwieldy and clumsy; observation of
Parisian street traffic is all that is really necessary
to impress one with the belief that, in case of need,
the Paris policeman would always, with much noise
and melodrama, arrest the wrong person.

The police of Berlin are vastly better than those
of Paris. They do not look as well, by our notions,
as their English equals, but they are fairly smart.

226 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

The mounted force is much in evidence, and looks
really fine, on good horses. The men are polite,
control traffic inexorably, and see to it that Berlin
remains one of the cleanest, most orderly, if ugliest,
of cities. But, as individuals, the Berlin policemen
are hardly to be counted at all; they are merely, like
all else in German officialdom, automatic parts of a
huge machine. When anything happens to you more
serious than crossing a congested street or losing
you way, you are fairly certain of running hard
against a city ordinance, mechanically enforced by
the man on the beat. Nor argument nor coaxing
prevails. There is the regulation, and here the in-
strument to enforce it; the human element is en-
tirely absent. Nor can one, in Berlin, count upon a
sense of humor in the police. The pranks of the
American college boy would not strike the Berlin
policeman as humorous; arrests would be the only
result. Both Italy and France are, as to their police,
more human, where the quality of humor is intro-
duced. In Paris you may make almost as much noise
as the cab-drivers themselves, and in Rome a friend
of mine cut all the strings of a toy-balloon vender's
stock, the other day, just for the fun of it, only an
expostulation from the nearest policeman being his
punishment, seeing he paid the peddler the price of
his stock in full. In Berlin you might have paid the
peddler the price of a hundred balloons; you would
still have been arrested.

In humor, in urbanity, as in perfect control of his
district, the London policeman is the nearest possible
approach to perfection. To the stranger he seems
the politest of all the Londoners. The shop people

LONDON 227

in London are, in the average, both stupid and rude ;
the supposedly well-bred people in Hyde Park, if a
hapless vagabond were to come to them for infor-
mation, would be either insolent or unintelligible;
the policeman, however, seems invariably polite,
wonderfully well informed, and furnished with Eng-
lish that is not nearly so atrociously cockney as that
of some who fancy themselves his betters. I have
yet to find the American who, on approaching a Lon-
don policeman under any circumstances whatever,
did not come from the encounter grateful to the
"copper" in question.

Chiefly, however, it is in his control of traffic,
awheel and afoot, that the London policeman is un-
rivaled. When you consider the narrowness of the
streets you must constantly marvel at the problems
the London policeman is hourly asked to solve. The
wonder is not so much that cab accidents occur, but
that they should not be of hourly occurrence. Even
with our own broad thoroughfares the traffic at cer-
tain points is awkward enough; in the narrow ways
of London it would, but for the policeman, be im-
possible. Of all the many paths the London police
make smooth for the wayfarer, the pleasantest, and
the most important, leads to the park, where there is
never any end to the panorama or to the vitality of
interest.

IF you get up reasonably early you will find the
Row alive with notabilities. Occasionally these ride
later, between eleven and twelve, when the world of
fashion is in full array upon the penny chairs, but
mostly it is the very early morning that sees the best

228 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

riding of the day. It is the early mornings, too,
that see the rhododendrons at their fairest, with only
the green lawns and the trees as background to their
pink and scarlet and white splendor. It is really one
of the wonderful things of the world, this feast of
fashion, of human and equine aristocracy, that Hyde
Park gives one for the price of a penny chair. One
spends one's two-cent piece, and is thereafter free of
the most typical, most satisfactory spectacle in Lon-
don; there are regions of the park where you may
see the red-cheeked children of England; elsewhere
you light upon the amateurs of miniature yacht rac-
ing; here you come upon a military company prac-
ticing signals, and there you encounter a crowd as-
sembled to hear the flaming rhetoric of Socialism.
Contrasts are everywhere, but everywhere also, and
dominant above all else, are the flower and fashion
of London.

In fine weather Hyde Park is one lovely lawn
party for all England. Between eleven and twelve
in the morning the beaux and the beauties stroll and
sit along the Row; from Hyde Park corner to the
Albert Gate crossing all is a frou-frou of ruffles and
laces and chatter and laughter. The men, in the
average, are a well set-up, well groomed lot; neatly
frockcoated and in high silk hats. Occasionally
there is an American or a man just up from Oxford,
distinguishable by straw hat and flannels. The
women are in their most elaborate, airiest gowns;
the American women, who appear now and then,
contrast strangely, in their snug costumes, against
the loose fussiness of the English out-door mode. It
is some little time before an American becomes used

LONDON 229

to realization of the fact that Hyde Park is one vast
lawn party, and that the fitting dress for it is the
filmiest material imaginable.

Like the metropolis itself, Hyde Park has its cus-
toms and its rules. In the morning one sits or strolls
in the Row; in the afternoon one sits on the grass
opposite Stanhope or Grosvenor Gate. Gradually
the carriages increase in number. Well-known peo-
ple appear. Before one is the erratic architecture of
Park Lane, with its countless varied interests. Here
all the newest millionaires have houses; yonder the
Stars and Stripes flies over Whitelaw Reid's tempo-
rary abode, and nearby is the younger Pierpont Mor-
gan's domicile. Ducal residences are too frequent
to deserve notice in Park Lane. Their owners may
be beside you in the grass, on penny chairs; you never
can tell.

Occasionally the procession of carriages stops;
those nearest the curb are opened while the occupants
alight and join friends sitting on the lawn. One
chatters of where one is going to-night, to-morrow
and the next day. One is to meet at a Carlton House
terrace dinner, or at Ranelagh, or at Goodwood.
The most marvelous creatures go up and down be-
fore one; South African millionaires of Semitic
cast; clean-shaven dandies who may, for all one can
guess, be mere West End counterjumpers ; dowdy but
impressive dowagers bristling with diamonds, lace
and lorgnettes. One hears an entertaining melange
of conversational scraps. A florid man, who knows
all the sporting celebrities, is turning little flashes of
light upon the passing throng, for the edification of
his son, still burned by the sun of India. "You see

230 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

that chap," he says, indicating with his eyes a man
who seems a cross between a Baron Chevrial and a
clothing-store dummy, uwhat d'you suppose he is?
Sells pickles! An Italian — sells pickles; and this is
how he spends his money. Gets 'em all on,' then
comes here and stares at the women. Walks up and
down here and then goes home and sells pickles."
People constantly walk up and down on the gravel
walk between the lawn and the driveway; constantly
they bow and speak to one another; it is London's
largest party. The facets of the picture are so many
that it is not easy to watch them all at once ; one can
spend the entire London season in mastering its de-
tails. In the carriages are stiff males and lace-cov-
ered beauties, orientals and pagans, poodles and
terriers.

ALL the fashion and frills of Hyde Park are not
confined to the driveway between Albert Gate and
the Marble Arch. To take tea in Kensington Gar-
dens is an almost equally pleasant part of the great
panorama of Hyde Park. It is just a pleasant walk,
no matter whether you enter the park at Albert Gate
or at Lancaster Gate, on the Bayswater side. You
enter by the little walk near the bridge over the
Serpentine, and proceed to find, under the trees, near
the sign announcing uis 6d Teas," the most comfort-
able positions possible. These are usually comfort-
able enough, being spacious garden-chairs of wicker,
placed about little round tables, the which are under
huge Japanese umbrellas so large as to be almost
small tents. After you have tried the eagle-eye trick
on the waiters for about ten minutes, in vain, you

LONDON 231

probably sally forth and kidnap one of these vassals
who, in turn, in almost another ten minutes, brings
you "a tea." All these waiters are German. If you
are an American and want a glass of water to drink,
even with tea, you will have hot water brought you.
It is useless to get angry; you will never convince the
Kensington Gardens tea-tyrants that cold water must
have existed where hot water is procurable; they
have, apparently, never heard of water as a bever-
age. In England, in different spots, "a tea" means
many different things. In Kensington Gardens it
means a pot of tea, with hot water, sugar and milk;
some slices of bread and butter, cut thin, and some
fruit-cake. The tea is fair, but the prospect is fairer.
Well-dressed people are under nearly every umj-
brella ; uniforms and oriental costumes are all about,
and over all is the intimate majesty of the trees, and
the wonderful quiet of this corner of the park, that
might, for all one can hear or see, be a thousand
miles from town.

Walking away from Kensington Gardens one is
not unlikely to come upon many curious features, as,
for instance, the old gentleman in the black stock
who feeds the sparrows. He has names for many of
them, and they come as he calls them, perching on
his hand to feed. He pays no heed to the carriages,
the strollers, or the automobiles.

On Sundays the routine of the park is changed.
The bandstand becomes the magnet for a multitude
that is composed of the plain people, not the fashion-
ables. The fashionables appear only for church
parade, for a half-hour or so just after high noon,
opposite Stanhope and Grosvenor Gates, and again

232 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

in the late afternoon. Near the Marble Arch the
Socialist gatherings are thick. Kensington Gardens,
on Sundays, however, no longer serve tea to the
select, but to the outsiders. These little distinctions
have to be learned by experience. Hyde Park is not
in a hurry to explain all its whims to the uninitiate.

WHIMS, moods, were not always, as to-day, to be
found in London town. Where all was once glacial
manner, moods, even the mood of passion, can now
be traced by the critic from his penny chair.

Many and changing are the moods of towns; we
all know how mercurial are the moods of Paris, and
how those moods have made and unmade history.
Until quite recent times such moodishness has been
but slightly typical of London. The town remained
sullen in its stoic reserve. The ha'penny papers were
allowed to shriek their woes and crimes to an au-
dience that, standing in superior attitudes before the
club fire, contented itself with wondering haughtily
what these abominable rags would do next. The
actual news of the world was by no manner of means
supposed to affect the welfare or otherwise of the
aforesaid superior person before the club fire. But
the stoic reserve is off now; the sullenness is changed
to passionate excitement, and London, for once in
its foggy life, is awake. The tenseness of its newer
moods jumps at you from every corner. Of old po-
litical campaigns made passing subjects for conver-
sation in casual places and among casual persons;
but nowadays politics are an inescapable obsession.
The most absent-minded of travellers cannot avoid

LONDON 233

being struck by the change that has come upon Lon-
don. And London is but typical of all England.

In ordinary seasons, in the last few years, there
has been only slight variation in the several sullen
moods of London. If we except certain scenes dur-
ing the Boer War, these moods have been no more
than the moods of fashion or the season. The shop-
keepers were servile in the one season, and con-
descending in the other. Yet all these petty differ-
ences in mood were matters only for the detection of
the keen observer. The newer paramount excite-
ment is another matter altogether; it hits the eye and
ear and brain of the most superficial idler. It is im-
possible to walk two streets without seeing and hear-
ing the political travail of England.

In the memory of those who know their modern
London well that town has not worn so peculiarly
distorted an appearance since the year of the corona-
tion. The present pervasion of political strife
through every avenue of life and traffic has a very
different effect from those succeeding waves of hope
and fear that came upon the place that year when
Edward VII lay ill in Buckingham Palace, but to the
dispassionate observer it is none the less of interest
and is like to remain in the memory. That peculiar
hush which crept upon London in the summer of 1902
remains one of the strangest physical expressions
of an urban mood that our generation can recall;
perhaps there has been nothing quite like it on
the American side of the water save the obvious
solemnity that made itself felt in Union Square the
morning Henry George died in New York.

234 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Where once the London hoardings held only plac-
ards announcing entertainments and soaps and hair-
restorers, you now find constantly predominant huge
posters proclaiming melodramatically this or that
political party cry. Here is a gaunt figure of an un-
employed British workman over the legend "It's
Work I Want," next is a loud printed cry "If the
People Do Not Tax the Dukes They Will Have to
Continue Paying the Dukes' Taxes." Where once
London traffic was interfered with by nothing more
alarming than this or that street being "up" for re-
pairs, the most sophisticated cabhorse is to-day likely
to shy in the most unexpected places as a result of
finding the most outrageously inartistic posters de-
facing a hitherto respectable private residence or
shop.

WHATEVER one's prejudices — whether born and
bred of those who are now daily being pilloried as
battening upon the public toil or unearned incre-
ment, or harboring the pleasant belief that all men
can be made equal by taking thought — it is inevitable
that one sees all this conflict as between the Haves
and the Have Nots. Whatever the reason, whether
free trade or the absence of the single tax on land,
the fact is hourly forced upon one that no country
in the civilized world has such hideous and debased
poverty as England. Italy, especially the districts
about Naples, knows poverty; but that wears, com-
pared to the English article, a blithe and careless air.
Such sodden, bleary, hopeless derelicts as may be
seen anywhere about the streets of London, or Man-
chester, or Newcastle, or Liverpool, it is impossible

LONDON 235

for the untravelled American to conceive. The Lon-
don Lancet itself has observed that there is nothing
dirtier in the world than the poorer sort of British
workingman; but the habitual workless and worth-
less loafer is dirtier still. In other countries, in even
the most crowded centers, as pointed out in my
Munich chapter, it is necessary to search for the
herded poor; in England their poverty, their filth,
their degradation are obtruded upon one in the
brightest of places. You are never safe from such
contact. Something, then, is radically wrong with
conditions that permit of such pauperism. Yet in
England such conditions, such pauperism, have al-
ways existed in recent recollection. One doubts
whether this or that government, this or that legis-
lation, has bettered or worsened this sore in English
life. The orators cry aloud their accusations and
their curses, yet one plain logical explanation none
of them has dared give, and that is the very simple
one of overpopulation.

England is overpopulated; English towns, more
than any others in the world, suffer from the "rush
to the city" and the consequent human ruins. No
political panacea can ever do for England what a
good thorough pestilence might effect. Old-age pen-
sions, preventives against unemployment — none of
these things can stay the evils of that very simple
human disease: overpopulation. The Radicals hope
to eradicate pauperism by pensions; and the others
allege that tariff reform will put an end to unemploy-
ment. But pauperism will always exist coordinately
with overpopulation; and as for the unemployed —
well, the simplest of logic suggests that if work was

23 6 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

really the dream and desire of all those who hoarsely
cry that the foreigner has stolen their jobs all they
had to do was to join the British army, which is con-
stantly begging for recruits. But Mr. Robert
Blatchford, Socialist as he is, knows his mobsters too
well; in a pamphlet about Germany he goes so far
as to say that the safety of England, in order to have
a really capable army, lies in conscription. He
knows that the professionally unemployed will never
join the army save by force, just as he knows that
many of the unemployed hate work like poison.

Overpopulation has brought the crisis about. It
has concentrated the Have Nots against the Haves.
The Haves are not as apathetic or as politically
useless as is the so-called silk-stocking element in
America. They do their duty at the polls, and have
always done so. The indifference of the "better
classess" of voters in America is notorious. Of that
indifference, at least, the gentlemen of England have
never been guilty. As Sir William Bull put it when
he got down from his platform and engaged in a
hand-to-hand fight with a Radical interrupter: "Sir,
I am an Englishman first, and a gentleman after-
wards."

So the moods of England, serious and gay, the
moods that are eternal and the moods that are but
passing, can be witnessed from a penny chair in
Hyde Park. All this philosophy, and all this pano-
rama is yours for the price of a penny chair. It is
one of the great theaters of the world, this park;
kings and queens, millionaires and peers play on this
stage side by side with nursemaids and fox terriers.

LONDON 237

Here you can study human manners and cosmic
tragedy. At Hyde Park corner you may see, at one
time or another, all the important figures of the
British Empire.

Surely if any inanimate object knows London life
by heart, it must be a penny chair in Hyde Park.

Ill

A PRIZEFIGHT BY WHITECHAPEL RULES

LEST it be supposed that details only polite or
political are to be emphasized in this glance at life
in London, let me stray, from Bond Street and the
park, to the extreme of Whitechapel.

It is to be remarked that despite the anarchist
affair of Houndsditch, the Whitechapel that sent
waves of fear over our polite world, some years ago,
would now be hard to find. To the careless eye of
the present, it remains merely an average section of
an average poverty-tenanted quarter. It has not
even the appearance of a slum. You may walk the
Mile End Road as unmolested as you walk Park
Lane. Streets have been widened, plague-spotted
tenements torn down. Apparently it is as uninterest-
ing as Second Avenue, in New York, or Clark Street,
in Chicago. There are countless shop-legends that
suggest the Ghetto and far-off Soho, but there is also
a spick and span Art Gallery magnificently laying
the ghosts of bygone "Jacks," yclept "Springheel"
and "Ripper." For the properly inquiring spirit,
however, Whitechapel still holds its individual flavor,
clear and strong. It is to Whitechapel that I owe

23 8 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

the richest evening of my London life. An even-
ing so rich in color and character that I can scarce
give more than a faint sketch of it.

That my introduction to the beating heart of
Whitechapel should have come as it did is part of
the irony of things, the irony of which that Art Gal-
lery is a note. It was neither a coster from the Mile
End Road, nor a Hooligan from Lambeth Walk,
nor yet Phil May and his cigar that lit the way to
Whitechapel for me. No; it was none of these. It
was, instead, the most dapper dilettante of my
whilom acquaintance.

For the sake of the ridiculous contrast, let me em-
phasize him a little. He was bloodless of com-
plexion, small in stature, delicate in hands and feet
and speech. He had been a tutor to the younger
sons of the aristocracy; he was of the tutor type
wedded to the dilettante type. His English was
beautiful in intonation and sweetness until you be-
gan to tire of the ineffable evenness of it. He had
been much on the European continent; he was un-
English in his manners and in his artistic likes. He
had written a mild monograph on Watteau. Un-
English as his ideals were in art, he was utterly Eng-
lish on other details; he scouted life in Paris, or
French cooking and the like, with the blighting
phrase: "We don't care much for Paris." That
was his sweeping sentence on all alien things : "We
don't care much for it," meaning "We English," and
lordlywise arrogating to himself the expression of
All England's opinion. He had a little Vandyke
beard, his hands were quite white, and he wore a soft
hat of the Hombourg style. When he was not de- -

LONDON 239

bating the advisability of abolishing the House of
Commons in favor of a second House of Lords, he
was, I presumed, considering the merits and dements
of such American millionaires as Morgan and
Yerkes from the point of view of one anxious to sell
the newest discovery in Gainsboroughs. When he
approached me, on that afternoon, I thought surely
it was for the purpose of sounding my peculiar igno-
rance of both these estimable collectors; I was pre-
pared to tell him that I had met Mrs. Yerkes, by way
of Van Beers, and that I had once stroked a collie
that had belonged to Mr. Morgan.

But it was not of plutocrats or pictures that the
Dapper Dilettante was then musing. "Do you
care," said he, ufor boxing?" You may imagine my
surprise. "There is to be some boxing," he went on,
"to-night, in Whitechapel." He showed me a let-
ter from the manager of a hall. It was a delicious
example in the non-committal. "Yes," it ran, "there
will be an Entertainment this evening, and we shall
be glad to see you." So non-committal was the note
that we hesitated a little; it seemed hardly worth
braving Whitechapel only to find some dull music-
hall program in performance. Finally we deter-
mined on risking it.

THE tube shot us from Park Lane's gateway, the
Marble Arch, to the Bank, and thence we fared by
omnibus to Wonderland. That was the actual name,
Wonderland. The Wonderland is in Whitechapel.
It had been a music hall, and for aught I know it may
be one again. But on that evening there was another
sort of entertainment.

24o VAGABOND JOURNEYS

The moment we entered the outer doors we were
conspicuous. We were utoffs"; there was no dis-
guising it; we were "toffs." We wore collars. Also
we were prepared to pay two shillings for one even-
ing's entertainment. We were importantly, impres-
sively handed from one functionary to another.
These functionaries were all intensely Hebraic, in-
tensely polite, intensely pressed for time, intensely
glittering under a huge star pinned over a breast.
All about us pressed and swore and smoked the bul-
warks of the British people, thick-set bullet-headed
costers and sporting amateurs from every one of the
plainer walks of life, and the be-starred functionaries
did not mean to let a single one of these bulwarks do
anything but enter and join the waves of smoke
within. So we were bustled to our places speedily.
Outside, the mob still crushed and jostled; gradually
the hall filled to the very rafters.

We found ourselves in the front row, facing the
ring. All about us tobacco smoke hung like a fog.
Through that fog one saw the hundreds of eager
faces, and heard the buzz of cockney speech. The
collars in the place might have been counted on one's
fingers. The fashionable neckwear was of cloth, dim
in hue, and knotted loosely at chin, under the ear,
anywhere. Derby hats or dicers were as rare as
collars; caps of all the sombre, indefinite tints pre-
vailed. Smoke everywhere. The faces were
weather-beaten, town-toughened, hard, brutal, too,
but not bad. Contrasting with this assemblage a
typical American counterpart, I noted that the well-
to-do patron was conspicuously scarce in this W'hite-
chapel hall. There was nothing to correspond to

LONDON 241

the stout, sleek persons who on the American side
make up the huge world where politics, pugilism and
gambling meet and mingle. That well-fed, smoothly-
dressed type was not in evidence. No ; this was the
Great Unwashed, the British Public from the bar-
rows of Covent Garden, the docks of the Thames,
and the sweatshops of Whitechapel. The only touch
that reminded one of America was supplied by the
fact that the proprietor of the hall was a Jew, and
nearly all the attendants were of his race.

The ring was strictly for use ; there was nothing
ornamental about it. The attendants, with their
towels and sponges, wore simply trousers and under-
shirts ; there were few refinements. It appeared that
the entertainment had already begun. It was dur-
ing an interval between two bouts that we had taken
our seats and begun our observations. Now there
loomed upon us a memorable figure. It was the
Master of Ceremonies.

This Master of Ceremonies brought back the days
of the Chairman in the old Music Halls before the
program came in. If you want to know how it was
in the days of yore in Music-hall-land, your only
chance is to seek out some such haunt of the pugilistic
British public as we found in Whitechapel that night.
The Master of Ceremonies is called generally the
M.C. for short. Resplendent in evening clothes and
a huge Parisian diamond star on his breast, he
mounted the platform and held up his hand. Gradu-
ally the cockney rumblings died down.

"Next, I 'ave the pleasure of interducin' Cockney
Joe and Bill Smith. Cockney Joe on my left; Bill
Smith on my right. Cockney Joe of Camberwell;

VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Bill Smith of Putney. You all knows 'em, and what
they can do. Six rounds. Referee and timekeeper
as before!"

Whereupon two awkward looking gentlemen
slouch across the ring, doff a garment or two, chiefly
consisting of neck-cloth, shake hands and begin.
The science is nothing wonderful, but the genuine-
ness of the encounter there is no gainsaying. The
fighting is for blood and verdict, not for money or
chicane. All through the rounds the cheering and
shouting are as interesting as is the actual pugilism.
One thing is unmistakable, the British delight in fair-
play. Good points are roundly cheered, attempts at
wrestling or staying too long in the clinches are jeered
at. Some four or five of the six-round bouts are
fought preliminary to the great event of the evening.
Some are between youngsters still in their 'teens
apparently, some between veritable ancients. The
names of the contestants are in themselves a treat.
I wish I could remember them. One encounter
was between a staunch youngster and a relic of other
days, whom the M.C. introduced for the great work
he had done years ago, when he had once stood up to
Jem Mace. Well-preserved as this ancient seemed
when he stripped, he fought so wildly, was so soon
visibly exhausted, that the decision, in mercy to him,
was very quickly given in his opponent's favor. But
how they cheered ! And how quaint sounded always
that stereotyped monition from the Master of Cere-
monies:

"Now, then, hands together for the plucky loser!"
In between the rounds, waiters of all sorts and con-
ditions circulated between the benches. Concerning

LONDON 243

the viands and liquors so dispensed, the Dapper
Dilettante had already warned me. He intimated
that it was dangerous to life and peace not to buy of
the offerings. Yet I determined to resist, if possible.
And I must set it down in justice to the Great Ma-
jority on that occasion that, though I was coward
and niggard enough to buy nothing, I was yet al-
lowed to escape without so much as a sarcasm for
punishment. Especially had I been warned anent the
stewed eels. To that warning I would, indeed, add
my own now and here.

Save for the hardened adventurer into the regions
of Darkest Cooking, the stewed eel of Whitechapel
is not to be commended. I am not narrow in my ap-
petites; the nationality of a dainty never confounds
me; I would as soon eat birds' nests as frogs, if
daintily presented; but at the stewed eel I admit I
quailed. I shall not try to describe its gray and
vague appearance. I thought of London fog in pro-
cess of liquefaction; and I thought, also, of a melan-
choly oyster I once absorbed from a barrow under
the Brixton railway-arch to the sound of a deranged
cornet. I recall the phrase of a famous epicure, but
I recall, equally, my own emotions, and I repeat that
there is nothing more dismal in life than to eat a
bad oyster to the tone of trumpets. All these chaotic
shreds of thought assailed me while the hoarse waiter
held me the cup of stewed eels; stoutly I resisted him
and his temptings. Not that I would decry the eel
as food. By no means. I have eaten smoked eels in
Pomerania that were as sweet as the whitest of flesh
and exactest art in smoking could make them; I have
enjoyed broiled eels from the Connecticut; and I am

a44 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

at all times ready to assert my appreciation of those
dishes. But the stewed eel of Whitechapel ranks,
with me, as does the lowest ratio in the following
anecdote :

An honest grocerman to a would-be purchaser of
eggs, thus: "Eggs, sir? Yes, sir. Which'll you
'ave, sir, country eggs at fourpence, fresh eggs at
thrippence, Danish eggs at tuppence, or The Egg at
a penny?" With "The Egg at a penny" I must here-
after rank the stewed eel of Whitechapel as "The
Eel."

Nor did the constant flow of "bitters" lure me.
I feasted on quite other things. On the untram-
meled humanity all about me, on the appetite for
stewed eels displayed by the majority, on the thirst
for bitter beer everywhere prevalent, on the solidity
of the tobacco qualms. Over and above the chatter-
ing and clinking came the voice of the waiters with
their eels and their beer. This was their formula,
full of delicate imagery, smacking of flattery, tickling
the vanity of the caps and the neck-cloths :

"I'm 'ere, toffs, I'm 'ere!"

The beautiful simplicity of that cry! Slang, the
world over, cuts always straight to the center of
things. It is folly to think that the slang of one
country is especially ahead of that of another. Con-
sider our own famous political phrase "What are we
here for?" It has its counterpart in the brief ob-
viousness of:

"I'm 'ere, toffs, I'm 'ere!"

Let the word "toff" be spoken in anger, in insult,
and what a chasm it at once opens between the gen-
tleman of the neck-cloth and the gentleman of collars

LONDON 245

and cuffs ! But spoken thus, in delicate appeal, what
soothing balm to the egoism of even the neck-cloth !
The main affair of the evening was for a matter
of ten rounds between one Jewy Cook and a Gentile
whose first name only I recall. It was Ernest, short-
ened by all into "Ernie." Everybody, in this bout as
in all the others, knew everybody else. It was "Go
it Ernie!" "Now then Jewy!" all the time. The
genial enthusiast who yells "Kill him, kill him!" was
not absent. He is the same all over the world, in
Whitechapel or Coney Island. But the order held
by the Master of Ceremonies in the face of these
apparent ruffians — for to the hasty judgment of sleek
citizens from other grades in life they may well have
seemed only ruffians — was something admirable.
He quelled the fiercest shouts, the deepest mutter-
ings. Before this main bout he showed his high au-
thority sharply: "All gentlemen will now stop
smokin' so all present may be able to see the event
of the evening, ten rounds between Jewy Cook and
Ernie Soandso." This was indeed a desperate bat-
tle. The Jew was bull-necked, broad-shouldered,
huge; he looked easily the winner. His opponent
was lithe, taller, thinner. He smiled constantly; the
Jew looked like murder. Ernie had the science —
that was plain from the start. The Jew meant des-
perate mischief; he went brutally at the hammer-
and-tongs game; more than once it looked as if he
had the other at his mercy. But skill kept Ernie just
safe, and all the time the bigger fellow, the huger
machine, the fiercer fury, was losing steam and
stamina. Ernie showed his mettle constantly, and
gradually, if surely, the balance of effective blows

246 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

was to his credit. The Jew took refuge in desper-
ate, time-killing clinches — so much so, that, for the
first time that evening, the referee, a plain, stout
person, had to step into the ring and constantly
separate the combatants by passing between them.

The public was well divided in its favor. Both
men had great records locally. My next neighbor,
on the other side from the Dapper Dilettante, was,
strangely enough, a huge Frenchman. He was con-
stantly needing my help to tell him who the contest-
ants were, and constantly, when the main bout ar-
rived, assuring me that Jewey Cook would half kill
his opponent. But he was destined to disappoint-
ment. By his science and staying, his keeping his
head and not allowing himself to be borne down in
the last clinching rushes of the now maddened bull
he was fighting, Ernie obtained the verdict to the
roar of a hallfull of cheers. Then, upon the stereo-
typed request of the Master of Ceremonies, a strange
thing happened. For the loser there came something
between silence and hisses. I knew well enough what
it meant. The British public simply had not liked
the way Cook had fought. He had been unfair in
his clinching tactics, and they knew it. That was
what they resented. But the Master of Ceremonies
motioned for silence. He introduced Mr. Jacobs,
the proprietor of the hall, a youthful, keen-faced
fellow of Cook's breed.

"You've seen many hard fights Cook has fought in
this hall, gents, and you've never seen him refuse a
fair fight in his life; you never saw him shirk his
work, and you've seen him meet many good men and
beat them, in this very hall; and I'm surprised the

LONDON 247

way you treats him when he loses. Gents, all hands
together for the loser."

Put in that way, and reminded of his past per-
formances, the public put its hands together. But,
pace Mr. Jacobs, that was not the point, and he
must have known it. It was the fight they had just
seen that they resented the methods of. And when
the British public resents, in fisticuffs or theatricals, it
hisses.

It was an incident not down on the program, how-
ever, that was most memorable. About midway of
the preliminary bouts, after the Master of Cere-
monies had announced the names of the two coming
contestants, there ran through the hall first groans,
then hisses. It developed that one of the contestants
was a substitute. The name on the program was
that of a public favorite ; the public wanted him, not
another, or they would know the reason why. The
Master of Ceremonies explained at great length.
The proprietor, Mr. Jacobs, always tried to keep
faith with his patrons; he held to his promises in-
variably. But in this case they were unexpectedly
disappointed. The boxer in question had been of-
fered a chance to go on at the National Sporting
Club the following Saturday, provided he missed to-
night's engagement. It meant twenty-five pounds to
him — that was what the National Sporting Club
offered him. After the Master of Ceremonies, Mr.
Jacobs himself stepped upon the platform and re-
peated these assurances, with the additional fact
that to prove his good faith he had persuaded the
boxer to appear before them that evening and speak
for himself and testify to the facts already stated.

248 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

It was all very entertaining, to the complete outsider.
But suddenly, in the midst of Mr. Jacobs' explana-
tion, a voice cried out from somewhere in the hall,
rudely and profanely announcing that it was all a
skin-game. Mr. Jacobs went white, but said noth-
ing just then. The boxer was introduced; shuffled
from one foot to the other; made his halting, though
evidently veracious explanation, insisting chiefly on
the twenty-five pounds at stake, an argument that
did not fail to move his hearers. They let him es-
cape with a hearty cheer. But Mr. Jacobs, still
white, held up his hand again.

uYou all heard," he said, ua remark that was
passed in this hall while I was speakin' a while ago,
and you all heard the meanin' of them remarks.
And I want to tell you that I know who passed that
remark, and though he's got more money than me, I
want to tell you that he don't never come in this
hall again." He glared at a benevolent Hebrew
sitting exactly opposite us, next the ringside. "I
mean Mr. Mordecai, and he knows I mean what I
says."

Whereon the fight proceeded. It was entirely
unimportant. The substitute, an Irish lad with red
hair, his name Fitzgerald, was plucky, but nothing
more. The public cheered the loser heartily. Mean-
while I considered the face of Mr. Mordecai. If
ever a person looked the one unlikely to have made
the remark that all had heard, it was Mr. Mordecai.
Of all the faces in that room, his was the most dis-
tinctly benevolent; the face of a kindly, shrewd He-
brew who had amassed money in trade. He seemed
a very John Wanamaker of Whitechapel. About

LONDON 249

him buzzed friends; conversation and explanation
buzzed all about him; it was evident that tremendous
matters were in the air. He looked like an injured
child. His mild eyes, his white whiskers, all seemed
to plead his entire ignorance of what the disturbance
was about. The white heat of passion was all this
time dying from Mr. Jacobs, and the calm light of
reason, to say nothing of friendly counsel, began to
exert sway. So that at the end of the bout wherein
the red Fitzgerald suffered defeat, the public was
again warned into silence.

uYou all hears the remark I passes in this hall con-
cerning Mr. Mordecai," said Mr. Jacobs. "I finds
I makes a mistake concerning who passed the remark
made while I was speakin', and the remark was not
made by Mr. Mordecai. I wishes to state that I
now knows who made that remark and I'll settle with
him later. But, me bein' a gentleman, and havin'
made the statement I did touching on Mr. Mordecai,
I will now apologize before you all, and Mr. Mor-
decai, also bein' a gentleman, will accept my apology
before you all, and bein' gentlemen both we will
drink each others' healths, after which we passes
the bottle among you."

And there, before all the hall, the hawkeyed Mr.
Jacobs and the benevolent Mr. Mordecai drank to
each other from glasses that had been filled for
them out of one bottle, and the entire hall roared in
cheers, while the whisky bottle was seized to pass
from mouth to mouth and become the occasion of as
near a riot as the hall saw that night. Finally one of
the waiters, so that the business of the evening might
go on, was forced to rescue the bottle and its dregs

250 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

from the very lips of the thirsty soul who was strug-
gling for its retention.

So, in peace and perfect amity, ended this lovely
episode. It was one of the most delicious expositions
of gentility in my experience. The hard emphasis
on the "gentleman" was so eloquent of the ambition
of even Whitechapel.

When all was over, the Dapper Dilettante and I,
making for the door, were suddenly overtaken by a
great rush and trampling, a shouting and crying.
We thought that, after all, after the gentility, and the
politeness, we were in for a riot. Had the police in-
terfered, at the very close of it all? But no; a be-
starred attendant took us, rushed us safely to the
street, and thence we beheld the flying wedge that
followed; it was merely the British public bringing
forth upon their backs "Ernie" the victor, in triumph !

The morrow might bring Watteau, but what was
Watteau to Whitechapel? I did not philosophize
upon this to the Dapper Dilettante as we proceeded
home, but I was muchly minded to do so. We had
been in the flesh and blood of men and matters; the
frills, in the dimness of the night we entered, looked
petty and puerile.

IV

A LONDON SUNDAY

IF there is one day more difficult than another to
fill with gayety in London, it is Sunday. Of the pos-
sible escapes from a London Sunday, it must serve
my present purpose to choose but one. If my choice

LONDON 251

is what is known simply as a day on the river, that is
because it still remains, in the simplicity of its out-
door diversion, most typical of English life. As
the Briton has brought to perfection most forms of
sport, so does he bring to boating on the river all his
genius for fresh air and exercise. Though the
Thames could well, in its upper reaches, be counted
as a tenth the width of the Mississippi, it remains
for all London, and all England, "the" river. If
you were, on the eve of an excursion to Windsor, to

IStaines, to Maidenhead, or to Oxford, to declare
you were going "up the Thames," the brand of inex-
perience would be on you like a shot.

London, on a Sunday morning, is a city devoid of
cabs and omnibusses, and populated only by persons
standing on corners and furiously whistling for cabs.
At ten on a week-day morning you may see shopmen
taking down shutters all over the West End; on
Sundays things are even later. Americans could
do a day's business in London before London was
out of bed. No wonder the British is lagging behind
the American and German empires.

At Paddington, that Sunday, one saw that the
river was to have a very big day indeed. . Public
cabs and private conveyances drove up every in-
stant; the platforms beside the trains were crowded
with men in light flannels, and white shoes, and girls
in muslins. and flannels. Almost every conveyance,
every man, carried huge hampers of wicker. These
were filled with the day's luncheons, to be taken under
the leafy river banks. A tremendous business is done
in these hampers. Almost every caterer or grocer
sells you one all filled with food and drink; the rail-

252 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

way company itself provides them ; you restoring the
empty hamper when you return to the station in the
evening. Taking a hamper has much to recommend
it; you can lunch as appetite dictates, and choose
your scene for the meal. Lounging on pillows in a
skiff moored under the shade of Cliveden Woods
has its charms for the gourmet. Yet a hamper also
constitutes a hindrance. We chose to do without
one, relying upon the little inn at Cookham.

The express reached Maidenhead in something
under an hour. The walk to Boulter's Lock is a mat-
ter of fifteen minutes. On the way we crossed a
bridge where a stone marked "twenty-six miles to
Hyde Park Corner." Just a delightful morning's
spin on a bicycle, some hours on the river, and home
in the evening, without need of lamplighting until
nine o'clock. Oh, the paradise for wheels this Eng-
land is ! But my wheel was rusting somewhere in
Maryland, and they put too many lumbering con-
trivances on English wheels to tempt one into hiring
one. In boats, however, it is very different. You
can't easily beat the pleasure-skiffs that ply upon the
Thames. You have fine thwarts, plenty of room,
perfectly dry floors, and a luxuriantly cushioned
space for the drone of the party to sit and manipu-
late the steering ropes. The alternative to a skiff is
the punt, very long, flat bottomed, and with blunt
ends. These are propelled by a huge pole, and one
must stand up to do the poling. Punts are very popu-
lar and comfortable, but we chose a skiff.

The river, wrhere we first put our oars into it, was
alive with craft of every sort. Launches and small
steamboats struggled and jostled about in merry

LONDON 253

competition. No sooner had we reached a bit of
open than we saw the press and scrimmage that de-
noted a lock. It was Boulter's Lock. We hurried
toward the lock as fast as possible. No rule of the
river was discernable. Asked upon this point, the
boatman, as he shoved our skiff into the water, had
merely said: "No, there's no rule on a day like
this, sir. You just does the best you can, and you'll
find it's a good-natured crowd." That was true.
There seemed little system, but much good nature.

Rose-covered houses of beautiful gray stone faced
the river everywhere; constantly one had glimpses of
that indoor and outdoor comfort that English coun-
try houses so excel in. Automobiles whizzed by on
the highway beside the left bank. A constant pro-
cession of persons strolling and riding and watching
the crafts grew closer and more crowded as the
lock was neared. The lock proclaimed itself by the
sudden acceleration and gathering closer of all the
boats, by the narrowing of the stream, and presently
by sight of the huge wooden gates that shut in or out
the water. One began to struggle for the front.
Presently one was inextricably jammed in the proces-
sion. One's bow lapped upon the stern of a punt;
one's own elbow rested upon the nose of a following
skiff, and a launch hung broadside against one's row-
lock. Oars, of course, had long since been aban-
doned. Progress was made partly by using the boat-
hook as a paddle, partly by hooking one's self to the
wall or to the craft ahead. If one were not afraid
of sudden jerks and crushings, one clung to the stern-
rail of a large launch, and so dragged in its wake.
Shouts grew distinct as one came closer to the lock;

254 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

one could see the lockkeeper and his assistants strug-
gling and steaming in efforts to bring order out of
chaos. "Come on there, now, with the skiffs! Keep
back with that launch ! Hurry on, Oona ! That'll
do; that's all. No more now; no, sir, you're too
late; next time for you, sir!" And the gates, opened
to let the first comers through, close in the teeth of
the second batch of expectants. One had to have
patience. The thing to do was to stay in as safe and
good a position as possible, and give one's self up
to observation of the picture.

Before one loomed the lock, a narrowing portal
of stone and two huge wooden gates. Above was
the lockkeeper's house, of grey stone, hidden in
clambering roses. The notice-boards of the Thames
Conservancy stood about rich in explanations and
monitions. The Thames Conservancy is the body
that keeps "the river" and its denizens in order.
And such order! An apple pie, sugared so as you
could write your name on it, is but slatternly in com-
parison. It may seem to those familiar with the
boundless fine freedom, not to say unkemptness, of
our Hudson, our Delaware, our Merrimack, our
Connecticut and all our other rivers, that this order-
liness of the Thames is a trifle petty, a bit old-maid-
ish. But there is no denying the result of all this
scrupulous care and good order is a river-traffic un-
excelled in entertainment and popularity. It is an
application, to aquatics, of the military precision of
Germany. What England lacks in perfection of
army and navy management, she gains in her sport-
ing details.

It is a crowd, waiting before the lock, that aver-

LONDON 255

ages pleasantly in attire and behavior. Maidenhead
and these contiguous reaches of the river are too far
from London to allow of the "rotter" or the
"bounder" to predominate; the undesirable elements
are absent. The men are cool looking and comfort-
able in light colored flannels, belted and straw-hat-
ted, as Panama hats are in every other boat, upon
both sexes. But the typical English girl does not
suit the Panama; it needs something more of the
dusky Spanish type. Occasionally, one sees a Jap-
anese parasol. The varied colors and patterns of
these are gorgeously brilliant under the cool greens
of the shading trees. Never was there such comfort
in small boats as on this river. The man is stripped
for his work of rowing or poling, but his fair es-
cort— what a picture of cool comfort she presents!
She leans into the cushions, stretched out, almost
asleep, barely holding the sunshade upright. Cush-
ions for her head, her shoulders, her feet. Yet the
boat is of the ordinary single scull St. Lawrence
skiff type. Yes, in the way of river comfort, all the
world may still go to school in England.

On the larger launches orchestras are playing
from the newest operetta, while elaborate ladies,
dressed as for drawing-rooms, lounge in wicker arm-
chairs and bronzed men, old and young, smoke ciga-
rettes and make heavy efforts at doing the dolce far
niente. Occasionally a fusillade of champagne corks
punctuates the music, and starts jealousy where it
does not produce gayety. At last, comes a wel-
come shout, "Stand by! Hold fast!" The lock is
to open, and one must prepare for the first rush of
the released water. A surge, a bump, a close haul

256 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

upon one's boathook which is held tight over a nail
in the wall, and, with laughter and shouting, all the
chance of danger is over. Slowly the boats going in
the other direction file down the narrow lane one
has left, and slowly, when the way is clear, one
scrambles and pushes into the lock that one has so
long lingered before. Again a wait ensues, while the
water slowly rises, and one's horizon changes from
mere wet walls to the boundless green of the fields
and the hills.

One has been known, on crowded occasions such as
this, to spend eighty minutes at Boulter's Lock. But
an end comes, even in England. The packed mob
pours, at the given word and the swung gate,
through the narrow portal, and gradually, past ivied
houseboats and leafy cottages, into the open water
where sculling is once more possible, and where each
boat can take its own individual course. Some pull
for the overhanging boughs of the trees, where the
boat can be moored, and in the cool, dark quiet, a
lunch can be enjoyed, or a doze, or a chat, a smoke,
or any form, in fact, of loafing. There are quiet
pools where lilies lie, white and yellow, and islands
along whose shores shy moorhens dart in and out.
Poppies are scarlet on the lowland bank; the other
bank rises sheer from river to sky, one mighty mass
of wooded green. These are the Cliveden Woods.
Occasionally, the white of a gable shines in the green,
or a stone landing-place breaks the perfect wilder-
ness of leaf and tree; but even these signs of human
habits do not mar; the graveled walk soon disap-
pears in wooded windings, and the hills make insig-
nificant the stone and mortar that try to break their

LONDON 257

beauty. So complete a wall of impenetrable green,
sheer from the current to the clouds, it will be hard
to equal elsewhere. Like all the English landscape,
it has an ordered, finished look; it is as if the Great
Gardener had said to himself: "Here, from this
little river to these hilltops, I will spread a velvet
carpet all of green."

Loafing along, enjoying everything, coming sud-
denly upon philandering couples half-hidden under
overhanging boughs, passing crumbling cottages and
barges that seem to have been asleep for centuries,
one issues, eventually, upon signs of a second lock.
It is the Cookham Lock. All the experiences of
one's first lock are repeated. Again one pays the
lockkeeper by slipping three pennies into the little
bag he presents at the end of a pole longer than most
fishing poles; in return for which you take and pre-
serve the red ticket that rests in the bag, since you are
paying also for your return trip. Again one
scrambles and waits, waits and scrambles.

I found the danger of the lock exaggerated, the
fun underestimated. A little skill in river-craft, and
some unselfishness will take any newcomer through
the lock-ordeal. The only danger is from pressing
too feverishly forward, getting jammed between a
heavy launch and the wall, and — crack! — having
one's light skiff snapped in two, one's self left sitting
in water. But even this means little danger; the
boats are but inches apart, one could not possibly
drown. Yet there is a certain comfort in observing,
next to the notice-board of the Thames Conservancy,
a placard recording the presence of life-saving ap-
pliances at each lock. Yes, they do these things well

258 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

in England. All is orderly, comfortable, and, for
all persons of good humor, as pleasant as possible.

The thing to do (we had it upon the assurance of
my friend the dapper little dilettante in cosmopolitan
entertainment, who mingled the cults of Watteau
and Whitechapel with Viennese coffee in the unpro-
pitious climate of London) was to lunch at the little
inn at Cookham. So, once safely through the sec-
ond lock, that of Cookham, a few strokes of the
sculls brought us to what was evidently the inn in
question. It fronted the river so closely that one's
skiff actually nosed upon the lawn where people were
taking coffee and cognac. Into the close-packed
ranks of the skiffs and punts assembled in this inn's
private waterway we ran our crafts and began at
once upon a new campaign, the search for a table,
and the things that hungry folks consider a table's
concomitants.

The reputation of Satan is scarcely wrorse than
that of the river inns in England. Robbery is
averred to be but a mild term compared to the
method of these inns. It is these notorious habits
that compel the river-going young men and maidens
to proceed upon the day's excursion loaded down
with hampers. The hampers may be unsightly, they
may destroy the comfort of the cab and the boat,
but they enable the great British public to evade a
palpable assault upon its patience and its pockets.
Yet, for our own part, we found this particular river
inn, not, measured by American standards, espe-
cially expert in robbery. It is true we spent weary,
anxious moments, waiting for and at last seizing upon
a table. It is true that we sat for long apparently

LONDON 259

as unnoticed as a grain of sand in Sahara. But these
things are incidental to outdoor dining the world
over. And the meal we finally got, about three in
the afternoon, having left home about nine, after a
slender breakfast, was one of the best we had come
upon in England. I recall especially some salmon and
cucumbers, good as only England can produce; also
a hock soup. The waiter was from Vienna, and he
served us the coffee afterwards upon the lawn, with
the most exquisite apologies for its un-Viennese quali-
ties. Somewhere, upon the lawn, a band was playing.
Gradually people began to call for their skiffs and
start for home. Loath as we were, we, too, were
presently of the home-bound company.

The homeward way differed from the outgoing
only in its greater pace. Where we had loafed we
now sped; the evening was cooler, and a pleasant
rivalry to reach the locks for the first entry was on.
But that fortune never befell us. At Boulter's some
characteristic conversation came to us. It was the
lockkeeper talking to a familiar in one of the waiting
skiffs.

"There'll be reports this day," he said, "three got
upset in this lock this morning." "Hurt?" said the
other. "No; but jolly well wet." And with that,
quite as an affair of course, the incident passed. We
spent close to an hour in Boulter's, but we regretted
nothing. We found a train at Maidenhead exactly
upon the point of departure, and we came, eventually,
upon London in the consciousness of having pleas-
antly escaped a London Sunday.

260 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

V

THAT LITTLE PLACE IN THE COUNTRY

To the English innkeeper I referred, just now, in
terms which, while not my own so much as those of
common report, were none too complimentary. The
more deeply one studies the public, purchasable, hos-
pitalities of England, the more one becomes con-
vinced that, whether or no we absolve the nation of
intentionally robbing the stranger while taking him in,
the art of wayside innkeeping is not now, whatever
may be the records of the past, an English one. This
is the more remarkable since England is otherwise so
eminent in outdoor life and sport. We have made
many comparisons in the foregoing pages; already
the question of cuisine in the leading European cen-
ters has come up, leaving England a straggler in the
race ; let us now see how even in its loveliest country-
sides, in its balmiest airs, England fails in realizing
its chances for being a wise and far-seeing hostess.

WHY do the English, why do the Americans,
flock so regularly to the European continent for their
holiday months? For this reason, briefly: the Euro-
pean continental has best solved the art of keeping
hotels. Think over the names of the great hoteliers
of the world; where they are not Swiss, they are Ger-
man, or Austrian, or even Italian or French. One
need not enter into the question of the great hotels
of the great towns, but simply with the failure of our
English cousins to keep a modest yet attractive inn
in the country.

LONDON 261

The English travel almost as avidly as do the
Americans. They flood the continent even more
continuously than we do; at certain seasons, when
but few of us are abroad in the world, the English
dominate the European scene. Able as they are to
make their journeys to the pleasure spots of Europe
so easily and quickly, they see many moods of the
continent that are not often revealed to us whose
holiday period is more confined. But why do the
English seek abroad, on the continent, their rest and
recreation?

Simply for this reason: the English themselves
don't know how to supply either rest or recreation.
The English innkeeper does not know what to do
with sunshine, nor with food, nor with the human
craving for light and laughter and music.

The English growl in their clubs and at their fire-
sides at the invasion of the European waiter. Every
now and again the old discussion rises again: Are
there no English waiters left to-day? Mighty few,
indeed; and mostly very bad. It is all very well to
talk of dumping labor on the British market, just
as foreign goods are supposed to be dumped into
the London shops ; the public would not buy shoddy,
nor accept inadequate service if the other thing were
to be had. If England made better silks and cottons
than the Germans, they need fear no dumping; if the
English were good waiters, the foreign waiters would
soon enough be out of jobs. The cry that the for-
eigner will keep body and soul together on what the
Englishman will starve on is simply one of those
smooth shibboleths with which the incompetent of
this world try to cloak the fact that they are going

262 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

under. At home, it is never (save in one or two
places of public resort, or in one's club, in London)
an Englishman who waits on an Englishman.
Abroad, when the Englishman goes to Venice, he
finds the hotels on the Grand Canal kept by Ger-
mans; in Sorrento, the managers, if not the owners,
are Austrians; even in Naples the Swiss hotelier is
to the fore ; from the Lido to Ostend he will hardly
find one of his own countrymen at the profitable
game of innkeeping. There is Bailey's, in Boulogne;
but there must always be exceptions ; and, by reverse
revenge, most of the great hotels the other end of
the same channel route, in Folkestone, are kept by
Continentals.

England plainly does not know the art of keeping
a hotel. If you point out this or that famously suc-
cessful inn in England, as the Old Ship in Brighton,
or the Lord Warden in Dover, those are still the
rarest of exceptions. England has simply forgotten
how. Once upon a time she must have known; the
fine old legends of mine host and mine inn indubitably
had much of their root in British soil. But to-day
she has forgotten. Just as in shopkeeping, the fine
old complacent cry rings out against all argument:
"We never have stocked that article, sir," indicat-
ing with the triumphant obstinacy of a mule that
what never has been never will be. What was once
good enough for British travellers must still be good
enough. Let motor cars and aeroplanes come or
not, as they choose ; here we are at the old sign keep-
ing our inn just as we did when an earlier George
was king. If you don't like the place, why, demme,
stay out it. And so all the world and his wife does

LONDON 263

stay out of it. And so all the world and his wife does
innkeeper looks sour and curses the world at large.

LET me give you a bit of vivid, illuminating expe-
rience.

It was little enough we wanted that day, within
this twelvemonth, — just a little place in the country
somewhere in England. As by telepathy we had all,
the New Yorker and ourselves, come to that same
decision; just rest, and peace, and English fare; the
English scene, the English air. In our preliminary
letters we grew quite lyric about the prospect. Dear
old England, etc. For weeks the New Yorker had
been in the clutches of a fashionable Kur-ort in Ger-
many; his term was about to expire, and his temper
was doing the same; he declared himself so full of
veal that he dared not look a cow in the face. As
for ourselves, the embarrassment of Parisian culi-
nary riches was heavy upon us; you cannot eat sole
with mussel sauce daily without ennui, and even the
coupe de fruits a la champagne begins to pall when
you take it every other day. Whenever a friend of
ours declared intention to return to America we asked
him, as with one accord, to do us the favor and eat,
for us, a good steak somewhere. We were sicken-
ing of sauces and of a-la's. We sighed for an honest
cut from the joint, with potatoes in their jackets.
We yearned to watch again the carver trundling the
smoking beef alongside and slicing off huge slices for
our plates. "Oh, to be in England ..." we sang,
and could hardly await the time.

Quite aside from mere food, there were plenty of
other reasons why we sighed to be in England.

264 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Some of us were somewhat too taut in the nerves as
a result of the pursuit of happiness in Paris; some
of us were tired of packing and unpacking; and some
of us had work to do, especially the New Yorker and
I. So, in the prospect, we told ourselves we would
do our work, we would regain our quiet nerves, we
would find our normal health, in that little place in
the country, in England.

Have you ever seen those lovely pictures which ap-
pear in the magazines about the time the theat-
rical Rialto awakes from its summer siesta? They
depict the famous matinee idol, in the act of shearing
sheep, or stacking hay, on his little place in the coun-
try, in England. Others show the great beauty, who
is incidentally an actress, watering the flowers on her
houseboat on the Thames. Others show the little
farm in Surrey owned by the well-known playwright
whose new comedy. . . . You know the sort of
thing. We had, in miniature, of course, brought
down to the proper scale of our own insignificance, as
it were, our own rustic dreams. The New Yorker,
indeed, came to the conspiracy armed with a map and
a plan that would have done credit to a search for
stolen treasure. We were swift on the trail with
him.

NEVER was a more glorious day in all England
than that day. Whatever else it may have done,
earlier in the year — and the inhabitants looked
gloomy when you mentioned weather, ordinarily the
only staple of English conversation — on that day the
climate could have been no fairer anywhere beneath
the sun. It was actually hot, though it was still early

LONDON 265

morning. The Channel glittered under a haze that
was Italian or American, anything but English. A
day, if ever there was one whereon to breakfast un-
der the trees, somewhere in God's own dining-room,
with only the world as walls. A day . . . yes, and
a Sunday, at that.

What a day for the holiday-makers ! We thought
of the crowds upon the roads to Versailles; of the
German families sitting in hundreds of towns, fash-
ionable and otherwise, listening to music and sipping
innocuous fluids; we thought of a garden in Florence
and the dinners eaten there under the moon with the
bells and the nightingales caroling— and then we
awoke to the fact that it was Sunday and we were in
England. Still, nothing venture, and there would
certainly be no breakfast under the trees.

We began at a large and luxurious hotel, where
the sun was simply ramping and raging to enter the
dining-room. We noted, as we entered, an evil
omen; the supercilious foreign waiters were pulling
down the curtains, and closing out the summer.
Breakfast outdoors! Unheard of! The air of:
%tSo was giebt's ja gar nicht!" carefully assumed to
prevent the average British traveler from suspect-
ing that the waiter was German.

Well, if not there, then somewhere else. We de-
termined to wander forth. Alas, we might be wan-
dering yet, if we had clung to our decision not to
leave that part of Kent without breakfast outdoors.
Through streets that reeked of stale Saturday nights,
of fish markets, of ham and eggs, we wandered;
nothing, nothing. At last, in a sort of clearing, there
loomed a likely spot; only an innyard, indeed, but at

266 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

least some space, some chance. All that was needed
was a little table, a chair; the rest was for the cook
and the waiter; there was God's sunshine, and there
was our appetite. But you never saw so bland a look
of amazement as was on the face of that publican
when we entered and put our question. Never had
such a thing been heard of, that was evident, and
rather than go carefully into a map-and-ax plan of
campaign, we simply went away from there. But
we could not refrain from one pathetic Parthian
shot : ''England does not deserve a summer, for she
doesn't know what to do with it when she gets it."

That episode was to be the keynote of all our
coming experience. Where, on all the European
continent, would you fail to find on such a day as
that your cup of coffee and your rolls served for you
out of doors? Oh, yes, the English will complain,
year after year, "We don't get any real summers
any more," but as for trying to learn how to live in
summer, when it really comes to them. . . .

Once again, let us not, in this detail, look home too
closely. We ourselves, in America, are but just
learning that we have an Italian summer. Let us
continue to regard the beam in our British cousin's
eye.

A British breakfast is not, even at best, an idyllic
thing. When you put it upon its worst possibilities.

. . . Well, we may say briefly that, like the
beasts of the field, we fed. Having fed, we returned
to the Great Affair. The Quest. The Search. The
Pursuit of Happiness, and the Little Place in the
Country.

The New Yorker pored for the hundredth time

LONDON 267

over his map. His informant was a star of great
renown, and a Frenchwoman, at that ; he raved about
how she had raved about the place. And, upon a
point like that, a little inn in the country, you may
depend upon it that a Frenchwoman would know.
. . . We sallied forth gayly into the Kentish
sunshine. Miles we went, many miles; even to-day
the thought of that cab-bill gives a thrill like a knife
cutting purse-strings. Miles, and some of them were
in circles; the fact of the matter was that the scenery
refused properly to correspond to the map. It sel-
dom does; inanimate nature, too, can have its share
of cussedness. At last, however, we found the place
that had most of the needed and stipulated attributes.

Roses clambered up the windows; there was a
tennis court, and bowers were athwart the hedges
wherein one could take one's tea. Yes, we would
have tea. Delicious tea. Never was such a day!
We had found the little place in the country. Our
appetites grew with our increasing joy. We turned
the simple tea into a luncheon. Such cold lamb; such
salad, and such fruit tart, with such cream ! There,
at last, was the thing for which we had come. Sim-
ply idyllic. Mine hostess, too; such fresh color, such
smiling eyes — well, if we couldn't be happy there,
couldn't do good work there, why — we laughed, and
asked to see the rooms.

Dreams, when they crash, crash quickly. It took
but one short question to shatter this one. There
was no bathroom, and there was no modern sanita-
tion. And upon that rock our good ship of hope
foundered. For our friend the New Yorker, lavish
and romantic enough in many ways, economic enough

268 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

in many others, is hard and practical upon the point
of open plumbing. New York has spoilt him, as it
has billions of others, for anything less than the best
in the way of bathrooms and plumbing. The hard
look of defeat came into his face when he listened to
the hostess' explanation that it was no bother at all
to bring the tub into the room every morning.

SADLY we spent the evening of that Sunday in one
of the huge hotels in Folkestone. A hotel like any
other large hotel in England; run by a foreign cor-
poration, manned by foreigners. Luxurious enough,
comfortable enough, reasonable enough; save al-
ways that you had to pay absurdly for your bath.
No wonder the legendary Englishman carried his
tub with him; without it he had been bankrupt long
ago. Consider: in Folkestone, with all the Atlantic
to bathe in, hotels charge roundly for a bath ! Well,
even so, the New Yorker and ourselves began to con-
sider whether it might not be possible, after all, right
there, to be comfortable, to do our work. For the
outdoor luncheon and the roses our yearning was
gradually dying; we were beginning to be content
with mere creature comforts, with large lounging-
rooms, with winter-gardens, with an orchestra play-
ing at teatime and after dinner. Perhaps, what with
the sea-air, and the quiet . . .

Hark! What was that? Beneath the windows
of our rooms a sad, a mournful noise. A dirge?
No; merely the English proletariat enjoying its Sun-
day evening, singing hymns upon the public square.
Hymns full of woe and false notes; hymns springing
from a religion without cheer; hymns from hearts

LONDON 269

that construe pleasure as either a dreadful or a dis-
astrous thing. The Sabbath songs of a nation that
does not know how to enjoy itself. The old French-
man was absolutely right; the English take both their
pleasure and their prayers sadly. If you want to
know where the Puritan spirit sprang from, go listen
to a Sunday evening sing-song on an English street.
Then think of happy families all over the rest of the
world, returning from happy Sundays, cheerily and
innocently spent; think, and pity the English, who
do not know what to do with either the sunshine or
with Sunday.

WE were not yet defeated. There was still Sur-
rey, and still the many little places on the river,
within easy reach of town. We took out other maps,
and other plans. We were to invade, now, a country
which, in the advertisements in the London news-
papers, reads a pure paradise.

First we went to Richmond. There is no prettier
spot than Richmond Hill in many counties. You
look upon the Thames winding below; between you
and that is only a pleasant slope of meadow and
wood; the roadway has houses only on one side so
that nothing interrupts the view. Some of the
houses looked nothing less than patrician — until we
went inside. For some of them were merely board-
ing-houses, after all. And such houses as they were !
Slatternly servants slopping about; the odor of stale
cooking; threadbare carpets, and unkempt curtains.
It was hard to ask even the most superficial ques-
tions; they wanted, for what they were evidently
quite unable to furnish, prices for which one could

270 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

live at well-known hotels in London! There they
were, in one of the gardenspots of the world, and
all they could do was to ask insane prices for non-
existing accommodations! Imagine that spot some-
where in Switzerland ! Every house would be appe-
tizing and inviting; you would read about it in papers
and periodicals, and when you compared the adver-
tisement and the fact you would find no appalling
discrepancy. If the Thames, there in Richmond —
or anywhere, indeed, from Maidenhead or Chertsey
to Windsor or Oxford — were anything but an Eng-
lish stream, what delightful inns and houses the trav-
eller would find along its banks !

House after house we saw, each more dishearten-
ing than the other. Only luncheon could hearten us
again. We found an inn. Upon the public road,
with motors whizzing noisily by. We had just
passed a less likely looking inn, where the "ordinary"
of the day cost half a crown, as we had seen plac-
arded in the window; but, well, somehow this other
inn appealed to us, and we presumed luncheon would
cost no more. But it did; it cost more than double.
By a simple device was this accomplished. On the
bill of fare there were no prices. This, all the more,
made you suppose the luncheon was at a fixed price.
By no means; it was merely a temptation; and our
temptation cost us the price of a good dinner at, say,
the Cafe Riche in Paris. We did not say the lunch-
eon had not been good; but our appreciation of the
food, of the interesting and tasteful pictures on the
walls, was spoilt by the mean little method of
hoodwinking one with an unmarked bill of fare.
One does not mind that sort of thing at the Cafe

LONDON 271

Anglais, or at Paillard's, or at Bellevue; and seldom
indeed does the true gourmet find, in those places in
Paris, that he has not, in one way or another, had his
money's worth ; but in a little two-by-three inn on the
main highway of Richmond — that was a bit too
thick! We never even paused to see if there were
rooms in that inn; we had discovered England's abil-
ity, if not to keep up to the times in sanitation and
outdoor entertainment, at least to keep up to them
in highwaymanry. But when the Continental robs
you, he does it with a smile; the Englishman, even
as he robs, grumbles.

We glared gloomily toward the old Star and Gar-
ter, closed, tenantless, another memorial to England's
inability to play innkeeper. Somewhat lower down,
nearer the river, was another quite spacious-seeming
hotel. It seemed the last chance; we attacked it.

It would be as hopeless to make you comprehend
the possibilities of that house as to make you believe
its shabbiness. Here, upon the slope of one of the
fairest of hills, looking on one of the most pic-
turesque bends of the Thames, was a castellated
house of several stories. There were gardens on
all sides but one ; that one looked directly into sombre
woods. Anywhere else but in England that sombre-
ness had been turned into something cheerful; ter-
raced walks and bowers had been cut and the out-
look from those bedrooms had been made as gay
as from all the rest. But these English were satis-
fied to let those windows open on a dismal and dank
backyard, set in miasmic clutter of trees whither no
sunshine ever came. They were satisfied to do with-
out carpets on the stairs and to let ceilings and walls

272 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

hang peeling in plain view, to have rooms so small
that luggage blocked the corridors, and furniture so
bare that all the rooms looked like prison cells.
From some windows there were views such as in
Switzerland, or Germany, or France, had made
the place internationally famous. These people let
the odor of corruption and carelessness stare you in
the face, and asked you five guineas a week for the
privilege! Oh, laughter of the gods! When you
can live in any one of the newer private hotels of
London for three guineas and in many places on the
Continent for less than that! But if you suggested
that to these good English people they reminded
you that perhaps, at another season of the year, they
might, etc., etc., but that now, in the season . . .
and then regard you complacently. Complacency,
of course, is what all England is dying of.

As for that "season," well, one comes to the con-
clusion that the innkeeper's "season," all over the
world, is when you are there, just as the publisher's
season is when you are not there.

We tried elsewhere in Surrey, in the lovely country
near Guilford and Esher, but it came to the same
thing everywhere. We read, again and again, those
alluring advertisements. Mostly, we concluded, they
were for people who wanted houses with innumerable
bedrooms and "stabling for seven horses." The
small fry, who wanted two or three rooms, with a
sitting-room and bathroom, were not catered to at
all. You could find plenty of places where you could
play golf, or tennis, or get good fishing or shooting;
but just quiet lodgings, plain, clean food, modern
sanitation and bathrooms, these things England has

LONDON 273

not got at anything like reasonable rates. Nor has
she got innkeepers that know enough to install such
comforts, or to take advantage of the wonderful
natural beauties of the country.

IT would be unfair to pretend that the continent
of Europe is entirely free from qualities, just re-
marked, in possession of which England has been
complacent for years. Annually, as the returning
tide of travellers is spilled upon our shores after its
invasion of the European continent and the British
Isles, we hear an increasing and portentous growl.
While a superficial majority is ever ready to aver
that it "has had a good time," a more captious minor-
ity reflects aloud that UA11 they want over there is
what they can get out of us." From this great presi-
dent of railroads or insurance company, and from
that great keeper of American hotels, we hear more
and more noisily the cry about the extortions prac-
ticed in the great European inns, and, indeed, in the
entire scheme of European travel and resort. Let
us not pause here for the somewhat ironic contem-
plation of the problem whether the European hotelier
and theAmerican life-insurancepresident arebrothers
under their skins or not; let us cling grimly, turning
our backs upon Altruria and all sardonic reflections,
to the fact that America, though it increasingly visits
Europe, has begun to rebel against the abominations
of the tips, of the sometimes too outrageous prices;
and against the innkeeping incapacities of England
itself. Let us avoid carefully any of the beams ob-
scuring our own vision: the hat-and-coat highway-
manry in our American hotels and restaurants, the

274 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

insatiable harpies of our public wash-rooms, the
sleeping-car monopoly which puts its employees upon
the pocket of the public quite as frankly as any hotel
in Europe.

No, let us avoid bringing our comparisons too
close home. It is only by such avoidance that many
of us can safely cling to many of our dissatisfactions
about Europe, and can become almost blatant about
being "back in God's country again."

"BACK in God's country again" is a phrase now
thoroughly incorporated into the American language.
To point out, before turning our back on England,
some of the little difficulties encountered in England
by those familiar only with the American language,
may amuse and sweeten our farewell humor.

VI

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

MY friend the American in London made a full
circuit of the park before he got his courage up to
the point where he brought his horse close up to that
of Dundreary Junior's and began:

"Say, I've been thinking it over, and you've got
to help me out: I'm living in the funniest little one-
eyed boarding-house near the Marble Arch you ever
saw. They call it a private hotel, but it's pretty much
all the same as a hash house on Clinton Street,
Brooklyn. Don't suppose you know Brooklyn, do
you? No? Well, you don't look it, I'll say that for
you. Well, it's like this: that same home of the

LONDON 275

j

friendless is full of the strangest dubs from strange
parts you ever saw. Reminds me of the barker out-
side the Philippine village at the World's Fair, who,
when he got tired of the crowd outside giving him
the ha-ha always used to scatter 'em with 'Walk up,
walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and see what strange
people there are in the world — besides yourselves!'
All right; there they are, as I said, dubs from the
outlands of Dubville, and yet, and yet, every last
one of them spots me for an American! I don't
care if they've come from Hongkong or Rhodesia,
they've not laid eyes or ears on me for five minutes
in the smoking-room before they ask me if our new
President is friendly to England. Now, as man to
man, out here in the open, under the same sun — I
guess there's a sun up there, somewhere over the
soft coal lining! — what is it about me that's a U. S.
A. trademark?"

Dundreary Junior has a drooping mustache, blue
eyes that can look extremely weary, and a smile that
makes rare appearance only in the presence of ladies.
He is one of the best turned out men on the Row, and
his lemon-colored waistcoat, his bowler that is ap-
parently in momentary danger of falling from the
back of his head, and his immaculate buckskin gloves
combine to make him one of the most frequently
nodded-to men in London. His seat on a horse is a
delight to the knowing eye, but in his speech he is typi-
cal of his town and his type. He looked at our
American friend for several consecutive moments,
achieved a slow smile and a nod in the direction of
a lady riding in the opposite direction, and then ven-
tured this definite explanation :

276 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

uOh, of course, don't you see, they would know
you, you see, like a shot. I mean to say, you see,
that it's quite odds-on, don't you see, that you — that
you are, you see ! You are, I mean to say; you are —
aren't you? Eh? You are, you see; you are. I
mean to say, don't you see, that it's quite the best
Starting Price job of the meeting that you — well, er,
that you would be, don't you see!"

The American chewed on that a little, and then re-
marked, apropos of nothing that Dundreary Junior
could imagine as relevant.

"Say, ain't it a fine thing we speak the same lan-
guage?"

A mob of both sexes cantered past, and Dundreary
remarked, in his usual casual tone:

"That's a nice cob of Lord Cadowgan's."

"Just as you say," said the American, "but whose
did you say it was?"

"Lord Cadowgan's."

"How d' you spell it?"

"C-a-d-o-g-a-n."

The American looked conscience-stricken, or as if
he had a touch of liver, or something equally painful.

"Good Lord," he said, "I've been making that
rhyme with — oh, well, with Harrigan, so far as the
vowels go, any way, Cadowgan — you say? Ah,
yes; it's just as I said; it's a God's blessing we speak
the same language. Yes, Sir. That's what keeps
the two countries so close together. The language.
Still, as I was saying, in that hash house of mine up
near the Marble Arch — well, I can't make up my
mind whether it's my feet or my accent ; but whatever
it is, they have me marked and branded. Sure ! I

LONDON 277

do my best; I try to talk just the same as you, just
the same. Yes, indeed. And I say, 'Don't you
know' at least every few yards. That reminds me,"
and a distinctly new look of puzzlement added itself
to the other sorts of amazement that had been flitting
over his face, "I don't know as I've ever heard you
say 'Don't you know' since I've had the pleasure of
your acquaintance. How's that?"

Dundreary Junior looked wearier than ever.

"Well, don't you see," he was beginning, when the
American interrupted him with :

"That's it! There we are, plain as the Statue of
Liberty I You don't realize it — I reckon it ain't the
fashion to pry into these little details of language in
London — but you've swapped 'Don't you know' for
'Don't you see.' Yes, now that I come to think of
it, the most frequent parts of speech in London con-
versation— if you call it conversation — (this was a
remark made only for his own ear) are 'You see1
and 'I mean to say.* Yes, I'll make a note of that.
Maybe if I use those bits of lingo often enough and
change my boarding-house, I won't get suspected of be-
ing made in America inside of the first twenty seconds
after they meet me. I'm sure it's not my accent, for
I've been here several months, and I ought to have
lost it, don't you think so ? As for my boots, I bought
'em right here in London, at an American shoe store ;
and if there's anything more sure than another in all
this wide and woolly world it is that all the shoes
sold in London's American shoe stores were made in
Birmingham or wherever it is you people manufac-
ture shoes; if those shoes ever saw Brockton, Mass.,
I'll eat — oh, I'd even eat some of that everlasting

278 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

haddock the head waiter tries to palm off on me for
breakfast ! I tell you right now though, the thing's
getting on my nerves, and if you don't help me out,
I don't know who will. As I say, I've been here long
enough, and summer's good and gone; there ain't
supposed to be an American left in town; I'm just a
left-over; and I'm doing my best to be a real Lon-
doner. Haven't I staid in London until November
just on purpose to see a November fog? No, Sir; it
beats me."

Dundreary Junior went on stroking his mustache ;
he had spied a lady he knew in the distance. By way
of elucidating the American's mystery he said:

"Suppose we do the bit by the Barracks?"

"Whatever you say yourself," said the American.
And Dundreary turned out of the Row on to the
path that fronts the Knightsbridge home of the
Guards.

"Sending the mare down for huntin' next week,"
said Dundreary Junior.

"Say it again," said the American.

Dundreary looked more bored than ever. "I
mean to say, don't you see, that the mare's goin'
down for huntin' next week."

"Ah," said the American, "there it is again, I tell
you; Mary's learning something every day. I see
how it is; you folks over here have made up your
minds that the 'h' has been getting kinder lonesome
getting lost all alone, so you've sent the 'g' along to
get lost with it. Hot scheme ! The two alphabetical
Babes in the Wood, ladies and gentlemen, little H
and little G. Goin' and huntin', eh? Another little
item for my little list. That's Gilbert, I know; but

LONDON 279

then we Americans appreciated Gilbert long before
you people did. Huntin', eh? So the mare likes
huntin' ! What is it? Pheasants or grouse or part-
ridges, and where does the mare come in?"

If boredom could be framed entirely into one face,
that face was Dundreary Junior's.

"Huntin' with Lord Beaver's hounds, don't you
see," he said.

"Oh, hounds! Excuse me! How d' spell his
lordship's name?"

"B-e-1-v-o-i-r."

"Great Greeley — and I've been making that
rhyme with Choctaw! Belvuaw, that's what I've
been calling it. What with the Franco-British show,
don't you know, and the Entente Cordiale, and all
that, and so as not to let my University Place French
get too rusty, I thought I'd get all the French accent
on some of these Norman names of yours around
here. And you tell me it's Beaver; alle same badger
or any other common bird or beast? Well, well —
say, ain't it a God's blessing we speak the same lan-
guage? Honest, it'd tickle me to death to have a
real heart to heart talk with you about some of these
little details of the language that binds us together,
tongues across the sea, as it were. Tell you what,
come and have lunch with me at the Cecil."

"Quite sorry! I just went and had a bone an
hour ago."

"Ham or whale?"

"Beg pardon?"

"Hambone or whalebone?"

"Oh, I mean to say, of course, don't you see, I had
a grilled bone at the club — "

280 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

The American smothered something that might
have been "Sell," but wasn't.

But he was not suppressed for long. At the
Marble Arch he began again.

"Say, this unemployed gag gives me the Willies!
If you ask me, I don't believe you could lead any of
that bunch to work, not if you blindfolded 'em !
Offer 'em a job and the first thing they want to know
is how much time they get off a week and how much
beer money; never what they will do to keep the job
down. No, Sir. I know 'em ! And they have the
nerve to ask Congress or Parliament, or whatever
you call it, to feed 'em, just for their consenting to be
alive! The world's full of places where you can't
get work done for you, and here this bunch stands
around a banner and listens to blood-and-thunder
talk. You ask any fellow-countryman of mine who's
ever tackled the hired man or hired girl problem
what he thinks of the unemployed! No, Sir; there's
no sympathy from me for that lot."

Past the Serpentine the American's horse disliked
the looks of the boathouse, and for a few moments
he had his hands full. But it was not long before he
was off again on his conversational excursion.

"Say, I wish I could sleep for about forty-eight
hours from this present writing. Want to know
why? Easiest thing ever! To-morrow's Sunday,
that's why. Sunday in London! Say, if I was one
of these fellows that write plays — the kind they like
in Germany, where a tragedy doesn't satisfy them,
but they have to invent an extra dismal brand of
drama and call it Trauerspiel — funeral play! — the
very first thing I'd do would be to write a funeral

LONDON 281

play and call it 'Sunday in London/ Yes, Sir, just
like that, 'Sunday in London.' And, mind you,
there's folks that doubt it, even for a minute; some
of them here in London have been sitting around
lately and protesting to the newspapers on the ques-
tion, Is London dull? Is London dull ! Is a Sunday
in London like a slice of the simple life, or isn't it?
Ask me; just ask me. Say, I've walked from Port-
man Square to Northumberland Avenue, all of a Sun-
day morning, in God's sunshiny hours, between 9
and u, and never met a human soul! Fact, abso-
lute fact! It was like this: A friend of a friend of
mine blew in from Chicago the other Saturday — oh,
sorry, sorry! I thought I was in God's country;
what I really mean is that he ran up to town from
the North. Lives in Newcastle, where the coal comes
from.

"We'd been racing together; he, being in the
know, dropped a wad, and little Me, from York
State, where the ponies are as extinct as the dodo,
betting a shoestring, wound up with my expenses
paid for a week. However, after a dinner at the
Royal, and a look in at a show — and say, the best
dance in your town is by a gang of Spaniards your
people haven't had the sense to boom, and their turn
is called La Flamenca and Her Lovers, or some such
name, and there's a girl in there could have my little
shoes and her big boots all under the — . However,
as I was saying, we came out of the show so early the
gentleman from Coaltown thought it would be a
shame to say farewell, and dragged me to the Savoy
to see the celebrities come and go. We sat there,
while those amazing males and females meandered

282 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

by, and when the lights of London began to get dim
we padded it out over the rubber courtyard, and my
friend from the Grimy wound up by asking me to
breakfast at his club. One of those solemn political
clubs on Northumberland Avenue.

"So Me strolling in the lonely sunshine of the
Sunday morning! Lonesome? Say, I felt like tak-
ing off my hat to Nelson in Trafalgar Square ! He
was about the only thing in the image of man that I
saw between Park Lane and Cockspur Street. And
I've found out the difference between a London club
and the other kind, too; the London club is a place
where you go to avoid the human race! If you see
a man you know in a London club you frown at him
and go on reading the paper; and to show you really
are at home you keep your hat on. Don't you run
away — what I mean is, Americans mustn't run away
with the idea that a club is a sociable institution; no,
Sir; we have that all wrong on our side of the water;
here, where I understand the clubs really come from,
the club is a place where you go to be let alone. Yes,
that's right; the only club where people don't seem
afraid to speak to each other, here in London, is the
Garrick Club. Fact! Well, that's how I came to
sample a Sunday morning in London. You'll admit
there's not much to do in London on Sunday."

"Oh, don't you see," drawled Dundreary, "you
can always hear the Guards' Band play at noon in
the park, and then, you see, there are always con-
certs in the afternoon. Besides, there's always, I
mean to say, church, you see — church, don't you

see."

"Yes," said the American, "there we are, don't

LONDON 283

you know — sorry, don't you see, I mean. There we
are ! Oh, I know the whole lot of Sunday attractions
in London; haven't I worked as hard as any nigger
trying to find them, in the first place, and then trying
to enjoy myself deliriously over them?

"No, Sir; no more Sundays in London for me, if
I can help it. I've tried everything to avoid them.
One Sunday I ran down to Brighton. Is that right?
'Ran down to Brighton ?' If it's 'ran up,' just correct
me; don't spare my feelings. Anyway, I took the
Southern Belle all Pullman express, and if you ask
me, most of the southbound belles on that train hail
from the Empire.

"However, far be it from me to quarrel with any
spice of life, even if you have to get onto a Brighton
train for it. I don't say, mind you, that Brighton's
any raving, tearing, giddy whirl on a Sunday, but you
can always stroll on the Parade and lunch at the Old
Ship, and eat oysters in Little East Street, and take
coffee somewhere else, and see the human show at
the various hotel lounges, and feel that you've got
away with the middle of the day without absolutely
perishing of the disease you're slowly but surely
dying of.

"Yes, I've seen it on you for a long time; and any
time you feel it's going to take you too suddenly,
just tip me a word, and I'll pass far away from here;
honest, I will. Bored, my dear boy, bored — that's
what you are. I've seen you drooping under it for a
long time. It's an awful complaint, and it affects
different people differently; it only makes you look
sad ; it makes me wild, simply wild ! Once, to get rid
of the complaint, I went even farther than Brighton;

284 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

I went to Paris over Sunday. Say, I'm at home there,
you know; they don't laugh nearly so much at my
French over there as they do at my English here.
Funny, that, eh? Shows what the Entente Cordiale
has accomplished, eh? Well, Sir, over there a light
or two came over me; your fashionable lot over here
in London speak much better French than they do
United States. Fact ! Why, if I could talk the real,
genuwine Hanover Square French, same as some of
your Bond Street swells do, I'd live in Paris all the
time, and get mistaken for a milord.

"Another thing you can see in Paris that you can't
see in London, and that's well-dressed English-
women. There are none in London, you take my
solemn word! They're all in Paris! That's one
thing I'd never have found out if I hadn't staid on
this side until after the other Americans had gone
back; the real swell lot from here only go to Paris
early in spring or in the winter; it's too thick with
Americans for them in the summer. Say — this
hands-across-the-sea business is great stuff, eh?
Honest, though, I don't blame you much; some of
the Americans that get into the limelight on this side
are the limit ! I'm thinking of a sight I saw at the
Gare St. Lazare the other morning, waiting for a
boat-train. She was a dream in purple, and she had
a purple bow around her pup's neck, and if I hadn't
known she was a vaudeville artist I'd have made the
same mistake the people in Paris were making, and
that was thinking all American women dressed on
that same key of X. How are people to know the
difference?

uAnd, say, there's another thing I'd like to talk

LONDON 285

to you about when you have time some day. That's
the exact definition of the week-end. As far as I
can see, the only sure thing is that it means the large
end of the week. IVe watched this thing pretty
close, and my conclusion is that the London business
man only works from about Tuesday noon to Thurs-
day P. M. How do I make that out? Well, I've
been through some pretty stiff doses of Whitmon-
days, August Bank holidays, Michaelmas Gooses,
and all the other festivals, and I've noticed that
when your lawyer or stockbroker, etc., says he's go-
ing away for the week-end, it means that he's leaving
Thursday evening and not showing up again until
Tuesday morning. Yes, Sir; it's the large end he
takes, all right, all right. And then, if you please,
he gets hot under the collar because the American
or the German gets a little business away from him
here and there. Oh, you're a funny lot here — if you
only knew it. Yes, Sir; you are to laugh; you are to
laugh. Which, of course, is meant as a translation
from Hanover Street French. Hanover Street
French is what your man George Graves is so fond
of getting off when he says 'Je ne pense pas,' which
is a rotten translation of 'I don't think.' Yes, I
know it's not American; it's straight Dickens; but
then a chap like you wouldn't know any more about
Dickens than about the Abbey or Stratford-on-
Ayvon — "

"Stratf ord-on-Ayvon ?"

"You mean Avon."

"Oh, rhymes with spavin, does it? All right.
Say, look, there goes a boy from E-ton ; I can tell by
his clothes."

286 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

"From where?"

"E-ton; rhymes with bon-ton, accent on the 'ton,'
doesn't it?"

"No; don't you see, it's just Eton."

uOh — rhymes with meetin', eh? dropping the 'g'
carefully at the same time as the voice, and otherwise
duly concealing the alphabet as much as possible.
Well, well, say — " and the American pulled up his
horse to pass out of the Marble Arch gateway.

"Ain't it great we speak the same language?"

CHAPTER NINE

WHEN EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA

I
FIRST PRINCIPLES FOR EUROPEANS

A1ERICANS returning to the United States
in the luxuriousness of "first class" must,
if they are accustomed travelers by
the Atlantic ferries, have noticed that
of late they by no means had the ship to
themselves. Year by year the number of Europeans
who have determined to explore these United States,
as of old they had explored Tibet, or Egypt, or Al-
giers, or the east coast of Africa, has been increas-
ing steadily. We have long known, of course, that
the fashionable tide has swung both ways for many
years; the more or less aristocratic or titled person-
ages who come to be dined and wined, and, if pos-
sible, wedded, have long been familiar figures in a
tiny section of our continent.

Yet these did not constitute real travelers. They
came to Newport or Bar Harbor or Lenox without
finding out more about our great country than many
Americans discover about Germany after a "cure"
in Baden-Baden or Kissingen or Wiesbaden. But,
as aforesaid, real travelers have begun to put in
their appearance. The more eagle-eyed of our ob-

287

288 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

servers may or may not have noted them; but the
steamship companies must have become pleasantly
aware of them; and our friend Baedeker long ago
stamped their existence definitely with his rosy ap-
proval.

How many of you, I wonder, are aware of the
existence of what to an American should be the most
fascinating of all the volumes in the famous Leipsic
series, namely, that entitled "Baedeker's United
States?" Yes, here it is; almost uncannily up to
date; and giving the most cosmopolitan and inter-
nationally minded of us something of a shock of
pleasure and surprise. In diplomatic complications,
in great international relationships, we have for a
few years been duly recognized by the European
concert; we have come, politically, to rank as a world
power; and now we are obviously admitted into the
ranks of the lands worth visiting. We may prepare,
then, for an annually increasing army of Europeans
approaching these United States of ours armed with
argonautic courage and a guidebook. We, going
forth to browse about Europe as upon a pleasant
pasture, are no longer to have it all our own way.
The European will be popping over here just as
brazenly as we now pop over to his country. We
have definitely joined the ranks of countries to be
seen.

We have been listed, summed up, mapped, and
planned.

There is a price upon our very habits; henceforth
the European may easily reckon just what it will cost
to visit us, to see our great cities, the wonderful nat-
ural picturesqueness of our land; and he can find,

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 289

upon a definite page in an easily pocketable little
book, the safest behavior to adopt in our presence.
No longer can we pretend to be a country of un-
tracked wastes, of a great American Desert, of plain,
uncharted materialism; no longer can the New Zea-
lander or the Chinaman accuse us of being beyond
the pale of civilized travel. The world seems all
turned upside down as one reads in a guidebook the
travel instructions, especially for conduct upon the
Atlantic, addressed to people coming to rather than
going from these shores.

To see our essentials, our scope, our riches, our
cities, our mountains, and our plains all done up in
a single, tiny pair of covers, gives, no matter how
much or how little we have traveled, as say our
friends the French, most mightily to think.

Each old traveler, paging through such a guide-
book, will find a different point for comment, for ad-
miration, for amazement, and even for dispute.
Hardly any traveler, however, with a reasonable
sense of proportion, but will find constant source of
amusement. Nothing seems to have been left undone
in the way of information; there are introductory
pages on our history, our Government, our aborigi-
nes, our physiography, our climate, our arts, our
sports, our educational and industrial resources — oh,
it is all there in a nutshell.

And in no less than one hundred and twenty differ-
ent tours and routes are our States cut up to make a
European holiday. It has always seemed proper
enough to find the various routes from, say, Naples
to Paris, set forth in the cold-blooded guidebook man-
ner; but it had hardly occurred to us that the same

290 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

thing could be done for the trip from New York to
Chicago ; from New Orleans to El Paso ; from Bos-
ton to Montreal. There were always, we know well
enough, the so-called railroad "folders," but those
were distinctly inadequate specimens of the "boost-
er's" art.

Our poetic friends, the real estate agents, occasion-
ally did a little in this way; but the trail of picayune
profit was somewhat traitorously over such ventures.
Say what you will against him, despise him as you
please, as a propagandist of travel, Baedeker is noth-
ing less than continental. He does not descend to
the petty; does not spoil his judicial fairness by pan-
dering to small condescensions toward commerce.
Observe his little warning, which comes in somewhat
pat at this moment :

"To hotel proprietors, tradesmen, and others the
editor begs to intimate that a character for fair deal-
ing and courtesy toward travelers is the sole pass-
port to his commendation, and that advertisements
of every kind are strictly excluded from his hand-
books."

Bully for B ! Most exactly he hits a nail on the
head. In the detail of literature the present writer
once propounded the identical theory: namely, that
no proper criticism was to be expected from the aver-
age newspaper until the advertisement of the pub-
lishers ceased. Against which it was invariarbly
averred that such an omission would be extremely
ruinous business for the newspapers. Well, the
Baedeker concern, one imagines, is not exactly bank-
rupt.

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 291

THE general tone, both in the introductions and
the body of the guide itself, is most happily balanced.
European prejudices do not seem unduly catered to ;
on many points one believes that Americans at large
would profit greatly by this notion of how others
see them. There is, for instance, no effort to decide
the vexed question of comfort in railway travel —
European or American. But this observation is
made about our day coaches :

"A single, crying infant or spoiled child annoys
sixty to seventy persons instead of the few in one
compartment; the passenger has little control over
his window, as some one is sure to object if he opens
it; the window opens upward instead of downward;
the continual opening and shutting of the doors, with
the consequent draughts, are annoying; the incessant
visitation of the train boy, with his books, candy, and
other articles for sale, renders a quiet nap almost
impossible ; while, in the event of an accident, there
are only two exits for sixty people instead of six or
eight. On the other hand, the liberty of moving
about the car, or, in fact, from ertd to end of the
train, the toilette accommodations, and the amuse-
ment of watching one's fellow-passengers greatly
mitigate the tedium of a long journey; while the pub-
licity prevents any risk of the railway crimes some-
times perpetrated in the separate compartments of
the European system. . . ."

These details are to us such commonplaces, so
closely familiar, that we occasionally lose our per-
spective about them. The point about the train boy
is well taken; and one is glad to note that some of

292 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

our wideawake railways no longer permit that in-
cessant pest.

I wonder, by the way, when the plague of plush
seats, in torridest summer, will be made to cease.

The hint at a European desire for fresh air, how-
ever, is funny; it becomes logical only when we recall
that this guide is written mostly for English travelers.
Whosoever has traveled much on the Continent of
Europe knows that there is nothing the average
French or German or Italian traveler clings to more
fiercely than his right to exclude fresh air from the
railway compartment.

A similar thought occurs when our friend hands
out the following hints to such American hotel keep-
ers as may wish to "meet the tastes of European
visitors" :

"The wash basins in the bedrooms should be much
larger than is generally the case. ... A carafe
or jug of drinking water (not necessarily iced) and
a tumbler should always be kept in each bedroom.
If it were possible to give baths more easily and
cheaply, it would be a great boon to English visitors.
It is not, fortunately, more usual than of yore for the
price of a bedroom to include access to a general
bathroom, but those who wish a private bath in or
attached to their bedroom must still pay about a
dollar a day extra. No hotel can be considered first-
class or receive an asterisk of commendation that re-
fuses to supply food to travelers who are prevented
from appearing at the regular meal hours."

Well threatened, indeed, that last! Behold the
bludgeoning of Baedeker! He would withhold the

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 293

great asterisk. For generations has it not been the
ambition of every European hotel — and, for all we
know to the contrary, every European artist, from
Praxitiles to Puvis de Chavannes — to be "starred in
Baedeker?" Well, here, then, is the ultimatum for
our own hotels. Let them take warning. The Eu-
ropeon traveler has a guidebook now, and the erst-
while autocratic demeanor of the hotelier and his
allies may have to curb itself a little.

The touch about the Englishman in search of his
bath is somewhat anciently flavored, however. Why
try to perpetuate that stale legend? We know, if
we know anything at all about travel, that baths are
almost as hard to obtain in England as elsewhere in
Europe; the Englishman may be as hardy a bather
as any of us in the privacy of his own home, but no
sign of any such habit is apparent in his hotels. The
only country of real indoor bathing facilities is our
own; let that be set down definitely, once and for all.

The Englishman and his bath have long been a
ridiculous myth. Years ago it was one of his insular
vanities — one of his ways of insulting all the rest of
the world — to travel with a monstrous tin bathtub
among his paraphernalia. He would set that tiny
oasis upon a desert of floor; have innumerable jugs
of water emptied into the tin contrivance; immerse
the edges of himself therein, and go forth purged, in
his own mind, of all his sins and convinced of the
filthiness of all alien creation. The German achieved
the same result in his sitz-bad. The Frenchman,
save as an adjunct to wine or syrups or a fashionable
bathing beach, has not yet discovered the uses of
water. No, no ; let us have no more talk about any

294 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

country save the United States knowing the real way
to the bathroom.

ANOTHER detail of railway travel here. We are
reminded that uno alcoholic drinks are served while
the train is passing through prohibition States* (now
somewhat numerous)." True, alas! how true!
Yet, if one could ornament a practical guide such as
this with the illuminating poetry of personal expe-
rience ! For, as has been often enough pointed out,
one result of the prohibition has merely been the
additional debauchery of the colored brother.

Upon the average through express, under such
circumstances, the wary traveler knows perfectly
well all he need do, if his thirst take a certain fiery
shape; he has but to tap on the door where the por-
ter of the club car slumbers and ask for a little ginger
pop. Out will come the ginger pop, the sarsapa-
rilla — it might be either, to judge by the bottle — and
down will gurgle the fire water. Cinquevalli could
do no finer juggling. You pay an exorbitant price
for very filthy liquor; you cannot complain, because
you are breaking the law, and so is the darky — and
the whole business is detrimental to public morality.
But we must not tell Mr. Baedeker about that; our
morals, happily, do not interest him. Wise men,
these Buddhas and Baedekers!

NOTE again, this: uln America the traveler is
left to rely upon his own common sense still more
freely than in England, and no attempt is made to
take care of him in the patriarchal fashion of Con-
tinental railways. He should, therefore, be careful

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 295

to see that he is is in the proper car, etc. . . . The
brakeman or trainman, whose duty it is to announce
each station as the train reaches it, is apt to be en-
tirely unintelligible." For years we have laughed
at these popular jests ; we were in danger of becoming
too accustomed to them ; it may be wholesome to find
them pointed out, soberly and in cold blood, as actual
detriments to perfectly comfortable travel.

But the "partriarchal fashion of Continental rail-
ways!" Oh, Du meine Seele, yes, indeed! Who
that in the old days ever journeyed on a bummel-zug
through Pomerania or Mecklenburg but recalls
that scene when the station master and the conductor,
having had every door in the train hermetically sealed
so that no passenger could escape, walked up and
down the platform in solemn conclave for at least
ten minutes. If the passengers were naive they
imagined great railroad problems being solved; if
they were sophisticated they guessed the conversa-
tion to be about nothing more exciting than the
weather. As in the caricature showing two monarchs
chatting; the world, straining to listen, fancies the
peace of Europe in dispute between them; as a mat-
ter of fact, one is saying to the other: "Edward,
who's your tailor?"

WHAT echoes of laughter arise at the start of the
paragraph on pedestrianism: "Except in a few dis-
tricts, such as the Adirondacks and the White Moun-
tains, walking tours are not much in vogue in the
United States," says our informant, "where, indeed,
the extremes of temperature and the scarcity of well-
marked footpaths often offer considerable obstacles."

296 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

To say nothing of the attitude of the inhabitants!
Can you not see the face of the average American
farmer if you arrived at the door while on a walking
tour? No; we cannot rank as a nation of walkers.
On the other hand, as this same critic points out,
you can trolley almost all the way from New York
to Chicago. That's the way we do our walking —
hanging on to a strap. A thousand pities it is that
we do not walk more. No motor, no conveyance of
any sort whatever can equal the pleasure of touring
afoot through Switzerland, the English lakes, or
Thueringen, or the Hartz or Tuscany, or any of the
many beauty districts of the older civilization. Have
we not quite as many fine regions? If we had not
known it before, this little guide would open our
eyes. The regions are there ; but what is fatal is the
attitude of our Americans themselves, those who
should do the walking and those who might do the
helping along the way. As long as the National
attitude toward pedestrianism is that it is a peculiar
form of lunacy, or the result of a wager, so long shall
we not rank as completely cognizant of our opportu-
nities for vagabondage.

MANY details of our language are evidently
thought dark for Europeans. So there has been
compiled a glossary of words which we use in a way
uncommon elsewhere. Among these we find: "Team
— often applied to one horse." Applause, please,
applause for the massive brain from Leipsic! Yea
and verily, the land is full of places where a team is
a single horse. It ranks with that other fine rustic
formula : "Fine hitch you got there, Eli," A hitch

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 297

meaning, apparently, the same thing as uteam."
Hitch, in that sense, is not yet in the Baedeker glos-
sary of United States phrases. Another matter of
language is the pronunciation of Chicago here given
as prevalent. It is indicated thus : Shikawgo. Now,
may we venture to doubt that such is the sound used
by, shall we say, the best people? It may be dan-
gerous to attack Chicago's own usage, which, nine
times out of ten, is as given above; but — well, it is
one of those matters of taste; and it does not seem
as if "awgo" was anything but an unnecessarily ugly
sound. Further on this same authority reminds us
that the name arose from the Indian Checagua,
meaning "wild onion" and "polecat." In such
strange ways, you see, we come to memories of the
stench characteristic of the Chicago River.

Each traveler will have his own quarrel with a
guidebook, yet all must admit some marvels it ac-
complishes. One finds no canal route named, for
instance, between Philadelphia and Baltimore, yet a
traveler told the other day of one of the most comic
incidents on that route. He had heard of it as a
scenic route; arrived to undertake it, and then found
only night boats running. This guide says nothing
of the part St. Joseph, in Missouri, played in the out-
fitting of the California pioneers. It does not add
the name of Adirondack Murray to those connected
with Guilford, Conn. English interest might have
cared for mention of the Lords Say and Seal, and
Fenwick, with the name Saybrook. In the list of race
courses, that of Pimlico, in Maryland, is omitted;
yet that is now almost the only fort left on the At-
lantic coast to those who like their racing undiluted.

298 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Nor among the hunt clubs are any of the Green
Spring Valley clubs given — the Elkridge Hunt, the
Patapsco, or the Green Spring itself. On one page
the following pleasant paragraph concludes with an
error:

"Times Square, the center of club and theater
land. In the middle stands the building of The New
York Times. The tower (twenty-six stories) is 363
feet high. The outside walls are of pink granite and
terra-cotta, and the interior is finely fitted up. Be-
neath it is a station of the New York Subwray. On
the corner of Forty-fourth Street rises the huge
Astor House.''

On an earlier page the Astor House and the Hotel
Astor had been dissociated properly enough, so the
above is plainly only an error in print. Lincoln,
Neb., is named as having educational and penal in-
stitutions, but the presence of Mr. Bryan is not
named in either category. On another page a phrase
of Henry James' is quoted as summing up the Saint-
Gaudens statue of General Sherman on the Fifty-
ninth Street plaza; a figure of dauntless refinement
it seems Mr. James called it; and for the soldier
who said war was hell, that seems a singularly inap-
propriate line.

However, as already observed, we may cavil as
we please, the thing we must do, after all that, is to
admit that the thing has been done excellently. Our
splendid cities, our magnificent landscapes, our Rock-
ies, and our rivers, our wealth and our climate are all
exposed and labeled here, so that all who run over
from Europe may read. Whether it is Fifth Avenue

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 299

or the Cliff Walk at Newport that the European
wishes to inspect, by aid of this volume he can pick
out all the notable spots, the homes of all the notable
people. If we thought before now that we had noth-
ing to show the foreigner, one look at this guide will
convince otherwise. We are somewhat crowded to
get into one volume, but some day, no doubt, we will
deserve two.

MEANWHILE a great responsibility falls upon
every one of us. If we are no longer immune from
the foreign tourist horde, if the German and the
Frenchman and the Italian and the Englishman of
idleness and means is hereafter to revisit upon us
something of the insulting and supercilious inspection
we have in times past bestowed upon his own lands,
why, then we will have to get ready to receive.

Has it ever occurred to you to contrast what Eu-
rope does for us, in the way of reception, with what
we do for "those others?" The contrast is wide
enough. They learn our language and they cater to
our ways, but there is not one of them who can go
to the average hotel or railway or police official here
in the United States and find any knowledge of any
other tongue than English. You have read the an-
nouncement that a certain number of Paris police-
men were also required to be interpreters. You
don't catch us doing much of that.

Our argument has been that Europe was a poverty-
stricken place, and they had to cater to us to earn
a living. The argument will not wash. We have
now been added to the Who's Who of travel coun-
tries, and we must do the civilized thing. Our hotels

300 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

will have to attempt a little study of European tastes,
a little smattering of their tongues. In every possible
way we must try to realize that we are now among
those present when the tourist of Cosmopolis takes
out his map of the world and asks himself whom
next he shall visit.

The table, like the inevitable wheel of fortune,
has begun to turn. We may prepare for tourists
from Europe, each with his little red book, coming in
swarms to peep at us and our strange ways. Singly
or in groups they will come ; omnibuses full of them
may halt before long in Times Square and have the
scenery and the passing throng explained to them
in the dialect of Paris or Berlin or Cockaigne. For
we cannot use the Monroe Doctrine to defeat the
world's lust for travel.

II

OUR CAPITAL GATEWAY

IT is not my intention to do more than indicate
some of the first guideposts and gateways to our
great country. To give to the European visitor even
no more than glimpses of our continent comes into
that informative province to which I make no pre-
tensions. Just a few remarks upon the human com-
edy as it passes through a typical American gateway
of travel; just a brief disquisition upon a distinctly
American specimen of the Personally Conducted
urban tour; and I am done.

OF adequate gateways, of railway stations to com-

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 301

pare with those in Dresden, in Frankfurt, in York or
many another European town, we had not, until
lately, much to show. At last, however, in Boston,
in New York, and in Washington, we have such gate-
ways to our continental travel of which not even the
richest country in the world need be ashamed. The
less we say of the past, the better. For many years
New York had not one adequate railway station;
Philadelphia was somewhat better off; but if Balti-
more has the stations it deserves, then it has never
been a deserving town. As for what happens when
you pass south of Washington, or west, it is better
to keep silence.

Let us take the station at Washington, a govern-
ment, not a private enterprise, as our typical gate-
way. Into that great cave of the winds converge all
the trains that are to radiate eventually to furthest
corners of the south and west. As for a typical time
in which to make our observations, let us choose the
spring, when all America is passing southward
through that channel.

Even the European gateways fall into insignifi-
cance against these vast marble halls on the banks of
the Potomac. Only in the newest of the stations in
New York is there such magnificent sense of space
and time. As train after train pours in it seems to
pour into illimitable void. The range of gates that
greet the issuing passenger are like the horizon-
touching pinnacles of some awful prison stockade;
you look in vain for the end; the fence goes on and on
as far as the eye can follow. In the rotundas you
have the sense of space and height that fills you
as you crane your neck in St. Peter's in Rome, or the

302 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

Duomo in Milan. The crowds of human beings
seem like tiny ants crawling. Steps and voices re-
sound in echoes as if you were in some mighty cavern
of the earth.

If we may, for the sake of whimsy, endow a rail-
way train with intelligence, this station at the capital
must radiate a certain sense of splendid satisfaction.
For this quarter of an hour — we may imagine these
trains sighing to themselves — we taste of luxury.
Here, for once at least on our long journey, we taste
of spacious comfort; here we have room and to
spare; here are all the needful conveniences, and
even some superfluous ones. It is hard not to give
way to philosophy in such a place. It has compressed
within it all the wisdom and experience of the past
and present, and it hopes to keep pace with the com-
ing years. What to-day may seem too large, too
empty, is nothing but the forethinking present's host-
age against the future. When we are dust, and when
to-day's machinery is rust, those magnificent spaces
will be as crowded, no doubt, as were any one of the
absurd little hives we called railway stations a gen-
eration ago. All those manifold conveniences of
home, the barber shops, the special platforms for
motor cars, and all the rest will be as full as now
they are empty.

But this philosophy leads us far astray if it gives
the impression that such a station has not its mo-
ments of exuberant life. These come when the fash-
ionable Florida trains come in. It is then that the
echoes are galvanized into real activity. Cabs and
motors suddenly pour furry and fluffy personages
into those tremendous rotundas ; the red-capped por-

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 303

ters have a brief period of labor and profit; and on
the long platforms beside the hissing locomotives
and the long Pullmans there are New York fashion-
ables commingling with Washington fashionables,
the social metropolis meeting the political, and all
alike bound South.

IT was there, then, on one of those long-covered
lanes beside a Florida Special that I walked, the
other day, with Dundreary Junior. Dundreary, as
I would not have you forget and as is notorious in
those fashionable parts of London which are his
proper habitat, is a handsome youth whose eyes wear
an air of perpetual amazement. He could look bored
in several languages, if he knew them; but the only
language he knows is the London version of our
tongue, and he uses very little of that. His fame is
in the silences; a peculiarly British fame. He lives
up to a tradition, the tradition of the habitually re-
served Englishman. As to whether his shyness and
his silence conceal amazing wisdom or sheer stupidity
authorities will eternally differ. What is quite sure
is that, save to his close intimates, he shows no other
front save that of bored and blue-eyed silence. But
his popularity, especially over here — this cannot be
impressed on you too often ! — is conceded even by
his enemies.

When last seen Dundreary Junior was riding the
Ladies' Mile in London. It seems that he took my
tip to see America, for here, the other day, I had
word of him being bound South after a too fierce fol-
lowing of the fashionable hunt in New York, and so
went to have a chat with him.

304 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

The pace, as gathered from his staccato speech
(which you need not expect to find reproduced here
with any sort of accuracy, since its peculiarly British
beauties prove too fragile for transmission), had
become too hot for him in New York.

"It was gettin'," he said, as we walked up and
down among millionaires talking of motor races on
Florida beaches, and beautiful women talking of
the carnival in New Orleans, "a bit thick. Took your
tip, don't you see, to do a bit of hig-leef over here.
Not a bad idea at all, don't you see, to change the
beat a bit now and then. Beastly bore, don't you see,
that rotten old Riviera and all that, every winter.
Same ruddy lot of bounders every year; nothing new;
might as well stay in the Big Smoke. Tired of hunt-
in'; bit bored with all the old lot of people; came
over here. Rippin' lot of swells here, no end, all
right; but I found I wasn't trained for it, not fit
enough, pace far too stiff. Sure to come an awful
cropper if I kept it up.

"Take this last week for a sample; first night,
musical tea for those earthquake Johnnies; second
night, some kind of a 'here's hair' ball for the blind —
pity they couldn't have seen it, too ! — third day we all
got ourselves caricatured by one of these artist chaps
who do the lightning cartoons at the music halls;
fourth day they do tableaux from the Rubayiat, and
I had to look like a jug of wine; and if I stayed
on another day I dare say there'd have been a supper
on skates for the victims of that collision at sea.
Killin' pace, I call it ! Awfully lovely parties and all
that sort of thing, and some of the girls are a bit of
all right, you can take it from me ; but it was gettin'

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 305

to thick for me ; I wasn't feelin' just fit for any more
of it. The forecast was all for some pretty stiff
doses of Wagner and Wilde, Strauss and the Rosy
Cavalier, too; and what with one thing and another
I thought I'd better be off. Pity to go home so soon ;
Italy and Sicily and all that have gone back in the
bettin' a bit lately, and the Atlantic's been about as
comfortable as Clapham Junction lately. So I
thought of Florida. What?"

I had not said anything, but "What?" is Dun-
dreary Junior's brief way of asking an opinion on
his present plan.

I assured him he could not have done better. We
continued to walk up and down, while the steam
hissed from the locomotives, and the other passen-
gers chattered and fluttered. There were travelers
of vast international experience who compared these
Florida trains with the Orient Express, or the Nord-
Sud Express, and you could hear much talk of the
P-L-M, and of the Southern Belle, and the Flying
Scotsman. There were pillars of society going to
Palm Beach, and you heard the names of hotels, the
Wreckers, and the Ponta Gorda, and the Royal
Poinsettia; they discussed the cuisine, and the serv-
ice, and referred to the sunshine with the air of
being able to pay for it, and therefore determined
to get it.

We were reminded of the dear old soul who went
to one of those cure-resorts chiefly renowned for
their air and their temperature, and, having surveyed
her hotel room, turned to her servant with, "John,
open the window and let in the climate!" There
were other fashionables going to Aiken, and Pine-

306 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

hurst, and the Warm Springs. Healthy looking men
discussed quail shooting in Carolina and duck shoot-
ing in Texas. You heard the uses and beauties of
the i6-gauge gun compared with the 12-gauge, and
the hammerless with the older type. There were
early birds making for the Mardi Gras at New Or-
leans, determined to forestall the terrific rush that
invariably brings discomfort to the general late-
comer there. There were those going to see Calve
in "Carmen" in Havana, or to discuss the inaugura-
tion of a Cuban President.

And finally there were those who meant to get the
outdoor best that Florida had to give.

Of these was Dundreary Junior. Although I
tried to paint for him the fashionable Florida of the
hotels, he did not respond with any great enthusiasm.
1 drew for him, in radiant colors from the rainbow
of the professional press-agent, the gorgeous gaye-
ties of life at the Royal Poinsettia — and all the
others. Those marvelous Moorish palaces set in the
glare of everlasting sunshine; I tried to do them
justice; but conscience rebelled at mentioning the
cuisine. Indeed, Dundreary had only to keep his
ears open to discover that the Florida cuisine is still
in Punch's category of things one would rather have
done differently. Still, to the people who like to
pay the most and get the least, that makes little dif-
ference; there is always more than one way of out-
bidding one's neighbor. As the talk took a gastro-
nomic turn, however, I could not refrain from
tempting our friend from the path he was on.

"Ir you would recover your gastric balance.

" so

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 307

went my siren song, "leave your train here, come out
with me through these cold and marble halls and see
what American cooking really means. We have
eaten together at the Cafe Anglais in Paris, at Dres-
sel's in Berlin, and Sacher's in Vienna; we have
known what Hatchett's in Piccadilly and the Bras-
serie Universelle can do in the way of a lunch; and
we once had coffee together at the Imperial in Trento,
and once watched the lovely ladies from the Pre
Catalan. Now, what you tasted in New York was
worth while, but not typical; it was the essential best
of all the other schools of cooking in the world; it
was not peculiarly American.

"If you want to know what American markets and
American cooking really afford, you must visit either
Baltimore, or Washington, or Norfolk, or all of
them. Walk through the markets of Washington —
they are out there with the Congressional Library,
and the Capitol, and the Washington Monument,
and all the other sights visited by the 'Seeing Wash-
ington's cars that await the Personally Conducted —
and you shall see things to remind you of Covent
Garden market, or the Piazza dell' Erbe in Genoa;
things to make your mouth water, and make you
want to be an artist in cookery instead of only a fash-
ionable young man. Stray back into Lexington Mar-
ket in Baltimore and see bay shad and strawberries
and French endives at prices that make you itch to
start housekeeping on the spot — to say nothing of
the adorable women you will see there and want to
go housekeeping with. Here you are, racing on to
Florida, after imaginary alligators and fictitious tar-
pon, and passing one of the few towns in America

308 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

that is still a little unspoiled by the mirage of too
great prosperity.

"You will not find better cooking in France than
you will in Baltimore, nor in Louisville finer mint
juleps, and not in Buda will you find better looking
women. There are few legends in the world that
our ageing and our iconoclasm have not shattered,
but the legend of the beautiful Baltimore women
comes true every day of sunshine. They are true
Southerners, creatures of warmth and sunshine; if
they had a London climate in that town you would
never know there were other than ugly people there;
it takes the sun to bring out those butterflies. An en-
tertaining chapter might be written on the hibernat-
ing tendencies of the Baltimore belle. . . ."

At this exact point of approaching the maudlin
Dundreary Junior interrupted.

"I say, don't be a bally idiot! I can't shoot alli-
gators here, can I?"

No; there are no alligators in either Baltimore or
Washington; terrapin is the nearest approach. So,
regretfully, our thoughts were forced back into more
practical channels. Yet we withdrew, but gradually,
from the subject of food. I warned my friend of
what the future and Florida had in store for him. I
told him fine and fragrant old legends about the rail-
roads in the South he would presently pass through ;
legends of the chocolate thumb in the soup plate, and
the refractory cow on the track; those legends have
not yet, despite the magnificent labels on the Florida
Limited Specials, quite joined the ranks of the ex-

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 309

ploded myths. I told him that if he should find him-
self sighing for the fleshpots he was not likely to find
them much nearer than Antoine's in New Orleans.
Then, unwillingly, at long last:

"So it's the alligator you're after?'*

Now that the buffalo is beyond reach of the man
who, seeing it is a fine day, must go and kill some-
thing, there is little left on our continent that has
more fascination than the alligator. The alligator
will soon join the bison and the American Indian as
an extinct native; to protect him there should be
Federal and State legislation, rather than individual
pursuit. My friend's desire, therefore, filled me
with regret. I tried to lure him into other Florida
enchantments; the tarpon, the canoeing across the
Everglades, capturing manatees, fighting sharks and
swordfish, and even hunting bees. But he harked
ever back to the crocodile and the alligator.

"You mean," I rebuked him finally, "the saurian.
Never say anything but saurian. It is one of the
oldest formulas of Florida that you must speak of
saurians as if they were relations of yours. Just as in
a recent deplorable disaster at sea you must always
refer to 'the ill-fated ship/ These things are the
small change of conversation that is safe always and
everywhere. They are the cliches of ordinary speech.
Gelett Burgess called them bromides, but that was
straining to invent what already existed; France long
ago dubbed the stereotyped obvious phrase a 'cliche/
and the phrase is better than any other. Of course,
then, if you are determined to hunt the saurian . . ."

"One of your rotten ha'penny paper jokes, I sup-

310 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

pose," said Dundreary Junior. And but for an
amazingly beautiful girl passing by at the moment,
he would have looked quite vexed.

I tried to persuade him that it was no joke at all,
but bitter truth. Drew him away once more from
the fatal subject; painted duck shooting in the most
brilliant colors, and went into raptures over house-
boats that were like palaces upon the Florida water-
ways, and yachts that glided like gorgeous phantoms
from one haven of luxury to another. Had him com-
pare the scenery with his memory of under the
deodars in India. Warned him that if he had been
bored stiff in the Circle of the Strangers at Charlie's
Mount he might be bored still stiffer by the gambling
in the melancholy garishness of a fashionable Florida
casino. Asked him to beware of catching speed-
mania in a motor on the Daytona beach. Yet he only
made what our ribald Teuton friend called

"Seelenvoll verlass'ne Oxenaugen" — and came
back to his eternal query:

"About those alligators, now?"

So that it was actually with a feeling of relief that
I heard the cry of "All aboard!" watched the last
pillar of society pass into the plushed and over-
heated Pullman, and waved a hand to Dundreary
Junior with a final,

"Remember me to the sunshine!" — and saw the
Southern contingent safely on its way.

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 311
III

THE PLAIN PEOPLE PERSONALLY CONDUCTED

IT is with a little glance at Personal Conducting
that I would conclude this book, which in a peculiar
rather than a popular sense has skirted that phrase.
Personal conduct, indeed, seen through the prejudices
of temperament, is what has informed my pages.
Meanwhile to deny the existence, or the humor, of
those who believe in being Personally Conducted, in
the popular interpretation, is a mistake I do not
make. Nor need a sophisticated, cynic view of travel
spoil appreciation of the simpler, more naive spirit,
in which the majority approaches its wanderings. To
prove such appreciation still surviving, let me sketch
such an urban specimen of being Personally Con-
ducted as may be counted typically American, so that
the reader may be soothed, as he lays this volume
down, into a mood of good-natured patriotism.

WHILE fashionables and cynics manage to achieve
the further places — manage, in short, to populate
those various resorts to which they long ago lent
their own adjective — the plain people, without the
least fear of being thought good form or bad form,
are bent upon having in their own natural and un-
spoiled way the best time possible that travel can
give them. Little care they that others sneer at
tourists; their natural enthusiasm in all things seen
and heard lifts them superior to small vices and to
petty pretenses. They are as glad to sit upon a
"sight-seeing car," that obviously labels them tour-

312 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

ists, as your fashionable friend would be to announce
himself a passenger on a millionaire's private rail-
way car.

Of the personally conducted, Washington is a fav-
orite American Mecca. We need not forget in New
York those torrid days of midsummer when the
Western cousin is loose in the land and invades our
feverish life with the breath of his own zestful en-
thusiasm. We know there are times when it is Niag-
ara Falls and Delaware Water Gap that the person-
ally conducted steer for. But as a type it is Wash-
ington that must serve our purpose.

The fashionables may turn up their noses as much
as they like; these people who are seeing their own
country are not persons to be sneered at. All honor
to these good folk who are seeing what to them rep-
resents the utmost civic grandeur of America —
Washington. Let them be fed with somewhat large
doses of marble and gilt, and with somewhat too
bitter a scent of the dollar; never mind; having seen
how splendid our young Nation is decking out its
chief show town, they are far more fit than they were
to appreciate the show towns of another hemisphere.

Certainly it is upon the American taste for mag-
nificence that the guides of the personally conducted
love to dwell. You have, if you wish this proved,
only to listen to the "lecturers" in the "Seeing Wash-
ington" motor cars. If you have a proper sense of
proportion and of humor you will be vastly profited
by such an experience. And the more sophisticated
you are, the more thoroughly you know your Wash-
ington, the more will you be amused.

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 313

THIS is going somewhat too fast. If you hurry
thus headlong into the party that is being personally
conducted about the sights of Washington, you will
have deprived us of an opportunity to consider in
a large and comparative way the whole tribe of the
world's personally conducted. And it is by knowing
the tribe abroad as well as at home that we can best
appreciate it.

Glimpses of the personally conducted must cling
to the memories of even the least traveled. You are
watching the scenery on the St. Gotthard, let us sup-
pose, and suddenly you observe that a sort of proces-
sion is being led through the train. The procession
is American; there are good looking young women
in it; and others not so good looking, but all intelli-
gent and vivacious. There is a shepherd to this
herd. All their gaze is fixed on this mountain, then
on that, and you discern a monotonous chant pro-
ceeding from the shepherd. They are personally
conducted. At Fluelen they leave you and file upon
the boat, and then, if you are given to visions, you
know that every one of these good souls will pres-
ently pretend curiosity about the Lion of Lucerne,
while really dreaming of the exact spot where the
lady of "Three Weeks" leaned over the balcony and
kissed her Paul. For not even the hard facts of
guidebooks and the personal conductor can kill the
romance in the densest mob of damsels ever let loose
by our schools or our popularity contests.

Lucerne, in fact, is one of the European heavens
for the personally conducted. From London the
Polytechnic people send down droves upon droves;

3i4 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

they even own a house of their own there, where the
P. C. victims dwell, one hopes, in perfect accord.
The Swiss in general, and the people of Lucerne in
particular, have brought the art of profiting from the
personally conducted to a point of genius. The
Washingtonians still have something to learn from
Lucerne.

Wherever you go, as so many of these pages have
insisted, a horde of grim strivers after knowledge is
likely to file across your horizon. A voice leads
them. You may be gazing raptly at some picture
that is not starred in the guidebooks, and the mo-
ment has for you in consequence its special consecra-
tion; you feel that you have discovered a beauty that
the others did not appreciate, you are gloating, you
are in the very ecstasy of selfish adoration, when
suddenly a whisper of voices and clatter of feet
come near; the whispering is louder somehow in
those rooms than any shout could be, and the band
of enthusiasts more conspicuous than a riot.

Again a voice leads them, they form a circle about
that voice, they stand in rapt adoration while the
voice hymns one of the accepted masterpieces. Now
it is a Carlo Dolci, now a Raphael, and now a Man-
tegna. The voice rises, falls, and finally moves on,
the circle of worshipers with it.

In Paris, as you are wending your way to the Bras-
serie Universelle for a bite of lunch, or to the Street
of the Fourth of September for a stroll toward the
Bourse, you find your way blocked by a Juggernaut.
On top of it they sit, the personally conducted; pres-
ently they will know more about Paris than you, or,
at any rate, they will know it differently; a look of

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 315

resolve is upon their faces, and what the traveling
American resolves to obtain he usually does obtain.

So, wherever you go, you will find these friends of
ours. Yet, here is a strange thing; seldom will you
find, in after years, one single soul of either sex who
will admit having "done Europe" in that fashion.
Where do they all go to, these millions and millions
whom one has met in every corner of the world,
members of gangs and droves and armies? Do they
suffer immediate translation into a future life? Do
they now tour celestial or diabolic ways?

Do some of them now listen while Gabriel with his
trump announces all the sights, and others while
Lucifer displays a few moving pictures with red fire
accompaniment? Certain it is that no more than the
dinners of yesterday are they now in our midst.

Can it be that in those ultra-sophisticated, bored,
and wearied travelers who told you only the other
day that they go every spring to Alassio, you could
find — if you had the proper magic for wiping away
years and the lies that the years breed — those self-
same folk who first went out into the world per-
sonally conducted?

The more you watch the traveling world, the more
will you be inclined to answer this in the affirmative.

AGAIN, there is not a little philosophy possible to
consideration of the many varieties of personal con-
ducting. Aside from the routine method, can we not
make the phrase stretch easily over many delightful
ways? And these, of course, are the ways that are
not down in any of the books. Most of us have some-
where a plea«an<- page ^f recollection fouching this

316 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

or that delightful scene over which we were guided
by a friend. That was being personally conducted,
in the closest, most intimate sense of the word. To
have seen New Orleans with one who knew old
Madame Begue herself, and who had sung that sweet
jingle:

There used to be a tavern by the corner of the road —

to have walked over the battlefields of Chickamauga
and Lookout Mountain with one who had fought
over every foot there and then had made each of
those scenes famous in literature — all this is to have
tasted most sweetly of one sort of personal conduct-
ing. To have visited our National Cemetery at Ar-
lington with one who had fought among those now
lying there so still — this also is to have tasted the
relationship at its best.

Every other friend, of course, pretends to be an
expert guide to Paris by night. Why, eternally, by
night alone? Why must those wretched members
of a whispering fraternity on the Place de 1'Opera
suffer so much amateur competition? Have they not
enough ill-luck in being such bad judges of human
nature? They have been known to accost, day after
day, for a week, an old and hardened boulevardier
for no other reason than that his clothes and his ap-
pearance in general were somewhat English.

What, we may well ask, are the wonders that these
whispering genii expose to those who engage them?
No doubt there are millions of the personally con-
ducted who could answer the question, but, alas!
these are those same millions who disappear into
sophistication and mendacity.

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 317

For a season or so perhaps they achieve great
local renown in this or that western hamlet of the
plain; they are pointed out as having "done Paris up
brown, you bet," and the cashier of their local bank
winks at them and says ugay Paree" now and then
while cashing a weekly wage. But that passes and
they reach the scornful state of those who pretend to
be above guides.

As a matter of fact — or rather of fiction — one of
those Paris guides might be made something of a ro-
mantic figure in a novel. Henry Harland gave us
the broken-down musician who played the piano in
a dive; now the same thing could be done with one
of those impertinent whisperers on the corner of the
Cafe de la Paix.

Quite another type of guide to those wishing to be
personally conducted about the rose-colored sides of
the world is the little lady who, if you have been wise
enough to convince her that you needed it, has taken
you by the hand and led you as near the real Paris
as your Anglo-Saxon temperament has permitted.
Her knowledge is not in any of the books and never
will be.

If you submit yourself properly, and if you pay in
the proper coin, you will learn things that neither
Vandam nor Muerger nor Locke nor Harland nor
Du Maurier nor any of the others were able to tell;
not that they may not themselves at one time have
known them, but that they are things that die with
youth, and that by the time you have come to con-
sider Paris a rather unkempt and dusty town of
badly managed traffic and ill-fitting morals, you will
have forgotten altogether.

3 1 8 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

"Louise, have you forgotten yet . . .?" asked
a poet once, and the chances are that Louise has not
forgotten, while you have; that is the way of the
world, even in Paris, and even in the realm of the
personally conducted. Over many charming paths
may Louise have conducted you in the most intimate
of personal ways, but now, alas ! as for all the others,
for you, too, sophistication has set in, and Louise is
gone into the limbo with the singer of Persephone.
Theocritus was the very first singer of the personally
conducted; he saw the shepherds and their flocks,
and he sang of them, and thereby he belongs in this
present bit of philosophy.

FROM Theocritus to the pimply youth with the
megaphone on one of the "Seeing Washington" cars
is a long jump, but we are able to take it. Everything
is possible to the glad and gay spirits of our party.
The phrase has a symbolism; it is one of the most
used cliches of the tribe; "our party" is the formula
most constantly used by the experienced guides.
"The members of our party will meet at such and
such an hour" . . . "the members of our party
will be glad to know," etc.

Our party, then, may be imagined to have made
the crossing safely, in their minds, from Sicily and
the fields of which Theocritus sang, to the great space
in front of the new Union Station at Washington.
It is from there some of these cars start with their
freight of the personally conducted.

More than all else, it is sunshine that enables us to
complete the analogy. Let it be a day of sunshine in
Washington, and the personally conducted will in-

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 319

deed have an experience to remember. For there is
something about our capital, when the sun shines,
that takes the chill from those marble immensities,
and adds humanity to its somewhat frosty splendor.

It may have been your fortune, in other years,
to have been personally conducted about the Wash-
ington that was on just such a day of sunshine; then
you can never have forgotten the sensation. From
the old station of the Pennsylvania you came at once
into the glare of the avenue ; darky boys went singing
gayly up the street; nobody was in a hurry; old white-
haired "uncles" offered you violets and arbutus on
the corners, and couple after couple passed you
whom at once you knew for bride and bridegroom.

Well, it is the same to-day. People are still
young; the sun still shines, and Washington, more
splendid, more marble, more gilt, is still the Mecca
of the brides and bridegrooms. Perhaps half the
young people on the car with you are brides and
bridegrooms ; let us hope so ; they will have a vapor
of romance about them that will lessen the somewhat
material flavor of the "lecture" you are about to
receive.

It cannot be denied that the expert guide who
shows us Washington — for a price — is somewhat
removed from romance. Perhaps he is the same all
over the world. And yet, and yet — remembering
our Mark Twain, we may recall that it was the
guide's very devotion to the historic and the ro-
mantic that disturbed the patience of those early
American pilgrims of the seventies.

Only onomatopoeia could do justice to the lecture
to which we are treated as we are personally con-

320 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

ducted about Washington. These lectures, of
course, are of the same type everywhere; we have
them to confusion and in profusion here in New
York; and we are very bored by them, and yet we
should not be ; for they add daily to the maintenance
of that element beloved of George Meredith, the
Comic Spirit. So let us listen, for a moment, to our
friend of the pimples and the persuasive song, as
he sings to us on the Touring Car that is Seeing
Washington.

"On your left — the addition to the White House
built in the time of President Rusevelt — on your left
— at a total of umpsteen millions, and covering um-
phaumpha acres, the largest building in the city. And
in the south — on your right, open from 9 A. M. until
4 P. M. — formerly the house wherein Congressman
Blank resided, now the home of the Indians when
they visit the Great White Chief, the term they ap-
ply to the President, open from 9 A. M. until 4
P. M. — on your left; the first house as we turn is
the most magnificent private mansion in the world,
costing umpsteen dollars, with a swimming pool in
the basement, and a private art gallery in the garret,
built by one of the leading society ladies in Washing-
ton from designs by the late Stanford White — on
your left, the large white building is the new annex
for the House of Representatives, to be connected
with the Capitol by an underground passage — cost-
ing umpsteen and a half millions and covering a
space of — open from 9 A. M. to 4 P. M. "

And so it goes, until you are in a welter of uon
your left" and uon your right," and you begin to
conceive of even the President himself as being

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 321

open from 9 A. M. until 4 P. M., and you hail with
infinite relief a sudden and unrehearsed shout from
the foreman of a street gang. The gang is busy at
a sewer pipe, and the road is blocked halfway across
its entire width; as the motor makes a careful ser-
pentine motion to navigate the narrow channel prop-
erly, the foreman sings out to the car, with a large
Irish grin on his face :

"This sewer was laid by George Washington —
and that's what's the matter with it."

Whereupon all the carload really drops its timor-
ous reserve and laughs, and at last, through our Irish
friend, the ice of being personally conducted is
broken.

Our guide, by the way, may be suspected of hu-
mor, though you never can tell. He gives us the in-
formation that the statue on the dome of the Capitol
is uthe largest lady in Washington," and we at once
think of that fine old jest about the lady on top of
the Siegessauele in Berlin being the only female in
Berlin "die kein Verhaelthiss hat," and you must get
a German friend to translate that for you, since our
own blushes are too much on a hair trigger.

Also, when the guide avers that in the matter of
new subterranean passage between the Capitol and
the annexes this will be the first time in the world
that "underground legislation has been carried on,"
we suspect him as merely voicing him who wrote the
lecture, and that must have been a man with humor
in him. But he of the pimples does not smile; he is
doubtless too tired of his story to know what smiling
is. At any rate, the touch about underground legis-
lation is a fine bit of backhand irony.

322 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

WHAT sticks out most plainly is that it is the cost
and the size that are most insisted on in everything
shown. This building cost that; that covers so many
acres; and that is the "largest in the world." The
Congressional Library holds so many books, and the
gold on the dome is worth so much money; but noth-
ing is said of the artists who have painted its in-
teriors.

Indeed, this is a distinct point: In all the day's
harangue only the names of Stanford White as archi-
tect and of Thomas Nelson Page as owner of a
splendid house were named by this person so fluent
in dollars and figures. Statues after statues were
pointed out, but never the name of a single sculptor.
No villa of an American equivalent to the Munich
painter, Stuck, is mentioned where those homes of
millionaires abound.

Is that not something to be rectified? Surely even
the plain people who like to be personally conducted
are reaching a stage where they no longer worship
the almighty dollar quite to the exclusion of all things
artistic.

We know that our millions do gaze upon the fres-
coes in the Congressional Library, and that thousands
went only the other day to the Corcoran to see a
splendid loan collection, and the Saint-Gaudens
statues, so those same millions and thousands might
just as well have their personally conducted infor-
mation leavened with the names of artists in the large
sense.

There is a fine touch when we pass the Smithson-
ian. With a brevity that is fine art at its best, our
lecturer informs us that it is the gift of uan English-

EUROPE COMES TO AMERICA 323

man named Smithson." Ah, if the car were not go-
ing so fast and the subjects did not change so swiftly,
what romantic addenda could he not have made to
that simple statement. "An Englishman named
Smithson" — yes, and one who vowed that when his
Northumbrian peers were dust his name would be
known to the world, and we know that he spoke
truly.

One wonders if those other many names that we
hear while personally conducted will last long or
briefly. All those amazingly splendid houses we
pass — first this well-known millionaire, then that
Congressman and that Senator, and then again this
or that "leader of society."

In the case of the "leader of society," we are not
moved to ask, "Where did she get it?" but in the
case of a simple Congressman we may well wonder
in the same direction. Well, all this adds to the
speculative philosophy possible for the price of being
personally conducted.

It is true that the guide cannot reveal to us the
old-time life of, say, the Arlington Hotel ; everything
to-day is emphasis on the cost and history of the
New Willard. Yet what a Dickenslike period the
Arlington stood for! Those strange dowager-
duchess types in the dining-room, those shuffling
darkies — why have their romances never been told?

Nor was there a word said of Chamberlin and the
gambling done there. Harvey's was named ; but then
Harvey's no longer witnesses "old man" Harvey
himself seeing that your kidneys and your sherry are
such as a person who knows both should have. Nor,
as has been hinted, will you be told who made the

324 VAGABOND JOURNEYS

statue of Sherman, or of Sheridan, or of Thomas,
though you may be told what they cost.

However, we cannot have everything. We can-
not have the fun of the thing, and all the profit, too.
Besides, some of us are brides and bridegrooms, and
content just to sit side by side and listen, and draw in
the delightful sensation of belonging to the largest
and richest nation of the world, a nation that is go-
ing to make its capital the most magnificent capital
in the world.

PERHAPS there will always be those who will sigh
for the old Washington, of the herdics and the old
confidential darkies who lied picturesquely to you,
and pointed out the wrong houses all the time. But
those will be simply sighing for their youth. The
thing for them to do is to accept the New Washing-
ton that is growing with great strides of marble and
park into a more spacious beauty than any Residenz-
stadt of the old world, as a thing to be eternally
proud of.

As for the romance — that, too, is like culture and
like youth; it is a question of temperament; some of
us have it always, some of us never.

IF you wish to keep your youth, fare forth on
journeys. They will start your humor, and humor
is the half of youth.

INDEX

Abbey, Edwin, 69
Abydos, 45
Ache, Caran d , in
Adams, Maude, 85
Adirondacks, 295
Akien, 305
Aix, 1 02
Alassio, 38
Alencon, E. d', 142
Alexander, Geo., 206
Alexander, J. W., 68
Allan, Maud, 94
Ammergau, 76, 83, 167
Anstey, F., 178
Antoine's, 309
Arlington, 316
Assouan, 41
Atlantic, 13-39
Azores, 14, 33

Baden-Baden, 102

Baedeker, 22, 44, 58, 287-300

Bahr, Hermann, 66

Baltimore, 181, 297, 301, 307

Barbizon, 15

Barker, Granville, 169

Battle Creek, 17

Bayreuth, 76, 83, 167, 170

Bayros, F. de, 74

Beardsley, A., 74, 96

Beerbohm, Max, 205

Begas, R.t 182

Beggarstaffs, The, 81

Bellevue-Paris, 152

Berenson, 55

Berlin, 69, 126, 155, 157-202, 225,

3i9

Bernstein, H., 141
Bernhardt, S., 68
Bierbaum, O. J., n, 77, 94
Biskra, 32
Bismarck, 66, 95
Blatchford, R., 236
Bleriot, 137
Bode, Von, 52
Boehme, M., 194
Boeklin, A., 41, 164
Boetel, H., 161
Boldini, 142

Bond Street, 22, 142, 203-223, 284
Boston, 27, 35, 164, 174-183, 301
Botticelli, 68
Boylston Street, 142
Boulogne, 262
Brighton, 262, 283
Broadway, 22
Broehmse, A., 79
Brillat-Savarin, 154
Brownings, The, 58
Bruant, A., 188
Buelow, Von, 181
Bull, Sir William, 236
Burgess, G., 182, 309

Cairo, 36, 41

Cappiello, 115
Capri, 36
Cardona, J., 96
Carlsbad, 102
Carmencita, 95
Carpenter, E., 57
Castellane, B. de, 142
Cavalieri, L., 161
Cezanne, 169, 182
Charpentier, 128
Chase, Wm., 53, 65
Chavannes, P. de, 293
Cheret, J., 96, in
Chertsey, 270
Chicago, 13, 130, 177, 297
Chickamauga, 316
Christy, H. C, 78
Cinquevalli, 294
Cliveden, 252, 256
Cloud, St., 113
Collyer, J., 179
Coney Island, 245
Cook & Sons, 46, 131
Cookham, 257
Connecticut, 243, 254
Constantinople, 40
Cordoba, M. de, 79
Corinth, Louis, 69
Corot, 84, 181
Craig, Gordon, 93, 171
Croker, R., 37

Dalmatia, 34
Daly, A., 221
Davis, R. H., 135
Davos Platz, 102
Daytona, 310
Dearly, M., 142
Detroit, 35
Diez, Julius, 69, 171
Dobson, A., 74
Dolci, Carlo, 314
Dover, 262

Dresden, 168, 170, 301
Dublin, 171
Duncan, Isadora, 96
Durieux, Tilla, 69, 199

Edward VII, 142, 233
Egypt, 40-50
Emerson, 166
Ems, 103
Erlanger, C., 128
Erler, F., 171
Eton, 285
Eulenburg, 70
Eve, Liane d', 95

Fiesole, 38

Fifth Ave., 204

Fisher, H., 78

Fiume, 34

Flaubert, 69

Florence, 36, 51-58, 86, 165, 177, 182

Florida, 302, 309

326

Fluelen, 313
Folkestone, 262, 268
Fontainebleau, 1 5
Forain, in
Forrestier, H., 79
Fredericks, 155, 160, 194
Freksa, F., 170
Fuller, Loie 96

Galanis, 76

Galsworthy, J., 169, 209
Garden, M., 161
Gaudens, St., 322
Gauguin, 182
Genee, A., 97
Genoa, 34
George V, 60
George, Henry, 233
Gerome, 41
Gibraltar, 14, 33
Gibson, C. D., 78
Goethe, 86, 89, 170
Graf, O., 82
Grillparzer, F., 88
Guilbert, Y., 96, 171
Guilford, 272

Habermann, Von, 70
Hamburg, 95
Hammerstein, 221
Harden, M., 160, 199
Hardy, Dudley, 81, 96
Harland, H'y, 317
Harmsworth, A., 256
Hart, Jerome, 153
Harvey, J. C., 154
Harvey s, 323
Hassall, J., 81
Harz, The, 85
Hatchett's, 307
Hauptmann. G.. 86, 88
Havana, 306
Haymarket, London, 132
Hearn, L., 49
Hebbel, 86
Heilemann, 76
Heine, T. T.. 171
Helleu, 142
Herkomer, H., 180
Hertenstein, 86, 89-92
Hewlett, M., 58
Hichens, R., 32
Hoffmann, Prof., 173
Hoffmansthal, Von, 170
Hohenzollerns, The, 163, 182
Hollaender, V., 194

INDEX

Hyde, T. H., 142
Hyde Park, 223-237,
Hyndman, H. M., 57

Ibsen, 86, 169

Tagow, Von, 69, 199
James, H., 58
Jank, A., 70

252

Japan, 40

Jeunesse, E. La, 142
Joseph, St. (Mo.), 297
"Jugend," 69, 78
Julian's, 55

Kaulbach. Von, 97

Keller, V9n, 70

Kempinski's, 158-164, 194

Kempton Park, 216

Kerr, Alfred, 70

Kissingen, 102

Kleist, H. Von, 86

Kley, H., 76

Klimt, G., 66

Krause, A., 79

Kroll's, 161

Kuessnacht, 89

Laffitte, 79

Landor, W. S., 57

Lang, A., 21?

Lehar, F., 24, 96, 125

Leipzig, 6 1

Lenbach, Von, 66, 70, 95

Leonardo, 53, 65

Lieland, Fr., 88

Liliencron, Von, 201

Lincke, Paul, 194

List, G. Von, 87

Lido, The, 59

Liverpool, 61, 234

Lloyd-George, D., 25

Locke, W. J., 317

London, 15, 36, 60, 81, 143, 173,

183-187, 303
Lortzing, 161
Loti, P., 32, 40-50
Louys, P., 128
Lucerne, 36, 86, 89, 313
Luxembourg. The, 72, 95, 192
Luxor, 41, 48
Lyme, Conn., 16, 83

Macdonald, Sir C., 206

Mace, Jem, 242

Madeira, 14, 33

Medeleine, M., 94, 97

Maidenhead, 251, 255

Makart, H., 95

Manchester, 61, 324

Manet, 67, 182

Mansfield, R., 181

Mantegna, 314

Marienbad, 102

Marigny Theater, 117, 188

Marguery's, 149

Maryland. 252, 297

Martin, Homer, 52, 58

Mai.irier, du, 15, 97, 188, 317

Maxim's, 73, 116, 121, 123-134, 188

May, Phil., 238

Medici, Lorenzo de, 58

Mell, Max, 94

Mendes, C, 112

Menzel, A., 160

Merode, Cleo de, 66

INDEX

327

Miehl, F., 79

Milan, 55

Miethke Gallery, 66

Millais, 65, 180

Miller, Joaquin, 221

Minneapolis, 37

Mirbeau, O., n, 112

Mississippi, 251

Monet, C., 67

Monte Carlo, 31, 130, 198, 310

Montez, l^ola, 99

Montmartre, 120, 144, 148, 151, 189

Morgan, J. P., 136, 229, 239

Moore, Geo., 58, 182

Morelli, 55

Morocco, 44

Moscow, 104

Moser, Koloman, 173

Mucha, A. de, 66, 68

Mueller, 79

Muensterberg, 167

Muenzer, A., 69, 81

Muerger, H., 188, 317

Munich, 59-100, 175, 235, 322

Nankivell, F. A., 80

Naples, 34, 155, 234, 262

Newcastle-on-Tyne, 61, 234, 281

Newnham-Davis, 153-155

New Orleans, 76, 115, 119, 153, 309,

Newport, 299, 303

New York, 13, 35, 115, 143, 298, 301

Nice, 36, 48

Nietzsche, 83

Nile, The, 32

Nobili, R., 54, 58, 182

Nora, A. de, 98

Ober-Ammergau, 83, 167
Orage, A., 57
Orange in France, 86
Osiris, 45
Osterlind, 79
Otero, 95, 142
Ouida, 36, 58

Page, T. N., 322

Paix, Cafe de la, 112, 135

Palermo, 34

"Pan," 70

Paris, 13, 36, 60, 63, 76, 79, 111-156,

187-192, 215, 225, 264, 284, 307,

314, 316
Parrish, M., 69

Persia, 44

3, St., 36,
Pett-Ridge, W., ^78

Peter's,

301

Philadelphia, 178
Piccadilly. 22, 106, 184, 205
Pitti Gallery, 38, 52, 165
Pittsburgh, 131
Polaire, 142
Pomerania, 243, 295
Pompeii, 35
Ponta Delgada, 33
Porto Riche, 169

Prevost, M., 112
Prutscher, O., 173
Putz, Leo, 82

Queenstown, 37

Raphael, 53, 314
Rapallo, 38
Raven-Hill, L., 81
Regent Street, 62
Reid, Whitelaw, 229
Reinhardt, M., 76, 93, 170
Re jane, 96

Recnicek, Von, 73, 77, 96
Rembrandt, 52
Ribblesdale, Lord, 207
Richardson, F., 19
Richmond in Surrey, 269
Riviera, The, 304
Robbe, M., 79
Robey, Geo., 171
Roda-Roda, 76, 201
Rodin, 67, 112, 113
Roelshoven, 53
Rome, 36
Rops, F., 68, 74
Rossetti, 115, 129
Rostand, E., 142
Roubille, 141
Roux, H. le, 153
Ruskin, J., 41

Saharet, 66, 95

Salem, Mass., 106

Salis, R., 190

Saltus, Francis, 152

San Francisco, 85, 153

Sargent, John, 65, 69, 95, 180, 205,

207-209

Saybrook in Conn., 297
Schnitzler, A., 125, 169, 201
Schoenbrunn, 94
Schopenhauer, 204
Schwalbach, 102, 108
Sem, 141
Seifert, Dora, 80
Sevres, 74
Shakespeare, 86
Shaw, Bernard, 217
Sheridan, Gen'l, 324
Sherman, Gen'l, 298, 324
Sicily, 165, 318
Simon, T. F., 79
"Simplicissimus," 74
Sisley, 182

Sleyogt, M., 69, 82, 182
Smithers, L., 209
Smithson, 322
Snaith, J. C., 209
Sorolla, 169

Sorrento, 33, 36, 155, 26^
Sothern, Dundreary, 147
Soudan, 47
Spain, 33
"Spy," 205, 221
Stamboul, 44
Stanislawsky, 93
Stevenson, R. L., n, 49

328

INDEX

Steinlen, in

Straus, Oscar, 194

Strauss, R., 97, 168, 170

Stratford on Avon, 285

Strozzi, Palazzo, 54

Stuck, F.. 41, 64, 67, 70, 82, 322

Sudermann, H., 86

Suresnes, 121

Taft, Lorado, 180
Tennyson, 221
Teplitz, 203
Tetrazzini, 161
Thebes, 41
Theocritus, 318
Thoma, H., 79
Thoma, L., 200
Thomas, Gen'l, 324
Thueringen, 296
Toole, J. L., 147
Toulouse-Lautrec, 96, in
Train, Geo. F., 221
Trent, 156
Troubetskoi, 142
Troyon, 84
Tuscany, 155, 296
Twain, Mark. 221, 319

Uffici Gallery, 36, 52, 65, 165, 177

Vandam, A., 317
Venice, 59, 262

Verlaine, P., in, 113, 192
Versailles, 113, 121, 152
Vienna, 13, 66, 94, 125, 156, 162,
173, 200-202, 258, 307

William of Germany, 162

Wagner, RM 64, 305

Waldoff, Claire, 171

Walkley, A. B., 97

Wall, Berry, 221

Wanamaker, J., 248

Washington, D. C, 31, 179, 300-324

Watteau 74, 238

Wedekind, F., 77, 169, 201

Wertheimers, The, 207

Wetzel, I. R., 82

Whistler, 72, 182, 221

White, Stanford, 322

Whitechapel, 237

Whiting, L., 57

Widmann, J. V., 88

Wiesbaden, 69, 85, 102, 106

Wiesenthal Sisters, 94

Wilde, O., 83, 97, 113, 173, 209, 305

Willette, A., 79, in

Windsor, 251

Wolzogen, E. Von, 86, 153

Yerkes, 238

Zorn, A., 65
Zuloaga, 95, 96, 169

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