TOURISTS IN WAR TIME—AND AFTERWARDS

Ettore Marroni

SPRING blossomed in Europe this year, without the usual flowering of American tourists. Summer came, and passed, without them. There were no Americans in the Kursaal at Lucerne, none at the short Prinz-Regent opera-season at Munich, none at Cortina d'Ampezzo in August, at the Villa d'Este, a little later. When we stop to think of it, what a funny place Europe must have been!

What happened to that sleek concierge at our hotel in Evian, he of the huge, blonde moustaches and the ubiquitous palm? Where is that little Carslbad waiter whom we are convinced we supported summer after summer? And the blind beggar on the Lung 'Arno at Florence who kept a nice villino with our daily soldo? Do they remember us? Do they regret us? Shall we ever see them again? When will they brush away the debris of war, sweep and set the hotels in order, harness the bored old horses to the hotel bus, deck the hotel porters with fresh gold braid and buttons, station the beggars and the postal-card vendors in front of our favorite views and prepare to welcome us again?

Tourist, a new word coined to signify a creature who is in a perpetual state of moving on. It comes from the French touriste, root, tour, tourner, turn, to turn; literally one who turns, who spins, who dervishes frantically. It has come to mean one who travels. The etymological determination is more descriptive than the complete definition. "He who turns" is a better description of a tourist than "he who travels!" To travel means some sort of spiritual or practical action—to amuse oneself, to go away on business, to meet someone, to seek knowledge or beauty or adventure, while the real tourist has no other idea in life but to satisfy an intimate, profound, unreasonable and incurable restlessness. He loves to catch trains and steamboats, to check luggage, to bribe customs officials, to tip menials for despising him, to eat poor food and to sleep in three hundred and sixty-five uncomfortable beds a year.

THE globe-trotter is a native of America. He has usually circled the earth four or five times and hasn't the slightest idea why. The only purposeful tourist I have ever met was a Bostonian. He had followed a bacchanalian itinerary in his travels and remembered Japan because he had been gently drunk on saki there, Russia because a glass or two of fiery vodka had completely upset him, Italy because a fiasco of fine Chianti, drunk at Fiesole, had thrown him into a period of dreamy intoxication. It had cost him a tremendous amount of energy and a good deal of money to drink ale in England, goat's milk in Albania, to sip Canadian whiskey on its native soil, and sample the foaming steins at Munich's Hofbrauhaus. He was a tourist with a purpose! Most of them play poker on the Righi, go shopping in Paris, motor over the Falsarego Pass in a cloud of dust, leap from a camel's back into an express train, from a gondola into a steam-launch, from a snowsledge into a balloon. They see nothing; their passage over the face of the earth has all the velocity of a comet hurling through space. They "check" Petrograd in their Baedecker and race pell-mell to Timbuctoo; they seem to be trying to beat a record with themselves; every time they circle the globe they stop long enough in Boston or St. Paul to take a breath; say, "Five times around," and dash off again. Perhaps they are satisfying a vagabondish instinct handed down to them by their immigrant forefathers, the "forty-niners." Travelling is only another activity, another nervous tension, another manifestation of the religion of Hustle.

T IKE the Englishman and the German, the American often repulses culture with fiery determination until he can afford to leave Keokuk and travel to cultivate himself. He wears his culture ever afterwards like an ornament or a decoration. It clanks with every step he takes.

The twentieth century has sanctioned universal suffrage. Anyone who is born a downright idiot has a perfect right to be intelligent. He has a right and, what is far worse, considers it a duty to be intellectual and to exalt himself in contemplation of the Beautiful. It has become the aesthetic equivalent of compulsory military service. Don't fancy that the conscripts are happy—a Frankfort sausage manufacturer, lying on his back in the Sistine Chapel, squinting into a pocket mirror at Michelangelo's muscular sibyls, is undergoing severe discipline.

It is all Keat's fault. He wrote: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," and our intellectual democracy has made it read, "A thing of beauty is a joy for everybody."

A work of art, a thing of remote and subtle beauty, has become a joy for Mr. and Mrs. Anybody! Ah, divine pleasure of the English flapper stuttering through Dante's Human Comedy. Oh, the thrilling happiness of the Metropolitan Opera House subscriber who has sat out three acts of Glück's Armide. Oh, supreme enjoyment of the Dresden hausfrau who gazes for the first time at Giotto's frescoes in Santa Croce!

The humanist and the aesthete are becoming rarer and rarer; the democrat in knickerbockers, scurrying through the art galleries and writing his own name and address on Alighieri's tomb, have put them to flight. If Winckelmann and Ruskin had returned to their beloved Italy last year, they would have discovered that nine hundred thousand tourists had spent an average of one hundred dollars apiece in eight months to be able to say they had been there!

THE war has swept the old world free of globe-trotters and has created a new racial and civic pride in all the different nations of Europe. When peace is declared, the German will hesitate before he crosses the Alps and takes his annual jaunt to the Blue Grotto of Capri. The Frenchman will avoid Vienna. The Englishman will give Berlin a wide berth. It will be left to the American to fill the empty coffers of hotels, pensions, museums and beggars. Fifth Avenue has been substituted for the Rue de la Paix; Grant's Tomb has done duty for Les Invalides, but when peace is declared the Yankee horde, like prisoners released from irksome bondage, will swarm across the ocean on their interrupted globe-circling. Then we will hear the'dear old bromides at our pension in Rome:

"So many lovely things in Italy! Too many. They ought to be cut here and there, like Wagner's operas. What awful hotels. The government is atrocious. The barber couldn't speak English. Venice is fantastic, but impracticable. Such awful smells everywhere. Rome is certainly too modern. Ah, how lovely the Medici tombs are . . . where are they by the way? The coachman cheated me out of a franc. ... I made a most awful row. . . ."

And Europe will be born again!