A Tramp Abroad

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> A Tramp Abroad


Foreigners cannot enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we can
enjoy theirs. It is not strange; for tastes are made, not born. I might
glorify my bill of fare until I was tired; but after all, the Scotchman
would shake his head and say, "Where's your haggis?" and the Fijian
would sigh and say, "Where's your missionary?"

I have a neat talent in matters pertaining to nourishment. This has
met with professional recognition. I have often furnished recipes for
cook-books. Here are some designs for pies and things, which I recently
prepared for a friend's projected cook-book, but as I forgot to furnish
diagrams and perspectives, they had to be left out, of course.

RECIPE FOR AN ASH-CAKE

Take a lot of water and add to it a lot of coarse Indian-meal and about
a quarter of a lot of salt. Mix well together, knead into the form of
a "pone," and let the pone stand awhile--not on its edge, but the other
way. Rake away a place among the embers, lay it there, and cover it an
inch deep with hot ashes. When it is done, remove it; blow off all the
ashes but one layer; butter that one and eat.

N.B.--No household should ever be without this talisman. It has been
noticed that tramps never return for another ash-cake.

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RECIPE FOR NEW ENGLISH PIE

To make this excellent breakfast dish, proceed as follows: Take a
sufficiency of water and a sufficiency of flour, and construct a
bullet-proof dough. Work this into the form of a disk, with the edges
turned up some three-fourths of an inch. Toughen and kiln-dry in a
couple days in a mild but unvarying temperature. Construct a cover for
this redoubt in the same way and of the same material. Fill with stewed
dried apples; aggravate with cloves, lemon-peel, and slabs of citron;
add two portions of New Orleans sugars, then solder on the lid and set
in a safe place till it petrifies. Serve cold at breakfast and invite
your enemy.

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RECIPE FOR GERMAN COFFEE

Take a barrel of water and bring it to a boil; rub a chicory berry
against a coffee berry, then convey the former into the water. Continue
the boiling and evaporation until the intensity of the flavor and aroma
of the coffee and chicory has been diminished to a proper degree; then
set aside to cool. Now unharness the remains of a once cow from the
plow, insert them in a hydraulic press, and when you shall have acquired
a teaspoon of that pale-blue juice which a German superstition regards
as milk, modify the malignity of its strength in a bucket of tepid water
and ring up the breakfast. Mix the beverage in a cold cup, partake
with moderation, and keep a wet rag around your head to guard against
over-excitement.

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TO CARVE FOWLS IN THE GERMAN FASHION

Use a club, and avoid the joints.



CHAPTER L [Titian Bad and Titian Good]

I wonder why some things are? For instance, Art is allowed as much
indecent license today as in earlier times--but the privileges of
Literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed within the
past eighty or ninety years. Fielding and Smollett could portray the
beastliness of their day in the beastliest language; we have plenty
of foul subjects to deal with in our day, but we are not allowed to
approach them very near, even with nice and guarded forms of speech.
But not so with Art. The brush may still deal freely with any subject,
however revolting or indelicate. It makes a body ooze sarcasm at every
pore, to go about Rome and Florence and see what this last generation
has been doing with the statues. These works, which had stood in
innocent nakedness for ages, are all fig-leaved now. Yes, every one of
them. Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody can help
noticing it now, the fig-leaf makes it so conspicuous. But the comical
thing about it all, is, that the fig-leaf is confined to cold and pallid
marble, which would be still cold and unsuggestive without this sham and
ostentatious symbol of modesty, whereas warm-blood paintings which do
really need it have in no case been furnished with it.

At the door of the Uffizzi, in Florence, one is confronted by statues
of a man and a woman, noseless, battered, black with accumulated
grime--they hardly suggest human beings--yet these ridiculous creatures
have been thoughtfully and conscientiously fig-leaved by this fastidious
generation. You enter, and proceed to that most-visited little gallery
that exists in the world--the Tribune--and there, against the wall,
without obstructing rag or leaf, you may look your fill upon the
foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses--Titian's
Venus. It isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed--no, it is
the attitude of one of her arms and hand. If I ventured to describe
that attitude, there would be a fine howl--but there the Venus lies, for
anybody to gloat over that wants to--and there she has a right to lie,
for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges. I saw young
girls stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gaze long and
absorbedly at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a
pathetic interest. How I should like to describe her--just to see what
a holy indignation I could stir up in the world--just to hear the
unreflecting average man deliver himself about my grossness and
coarseness, and all that. The world says that no worded description of
a moving spectacle is a hundredth part as moving as the same spectacle
seen with one's own eyes--yet the world is willing to let its son
and its daughter and itself look at Titian's beast, but won't stand
a description of it in words. Which shows that the world is not as
consistent as it might be.

There are pictures of nude women which suggest no impure thought--I
am well aware of that. I am not railing at such. What I am trying to
emphasize is the fact that Titian's Venus is very far from being one of
that sort. Without any question it was painted for a bagnio and it was
probably refused because it was a trifle too strong. In truth, it is too
strong for any place but a public Art Gallery. Titian has two Venuses in
the Tribune; persons who have seen them will easily remember which one I
am referring to.

In every gallery in Europe there are hideous pictures of blood,
carnage, oozing brains, putrefaction--pictures portraying intolerable
suffering--pictures alive with every conceivable horror, wrought out in
dreadful detail--and similar pictures are being put on the canvas every
day and publicly exhibited--without a growl from anybody--for they
are innocent, they are inoffensive, being works of art. But suppose
a literary artist ventured to go into a painstaking and elaborate
description of one of these grisly things--the critics would skin him
alive. Well, let it go, it cannot be helped; Art retains her privileges,
Literature has lost hers. Somebody else may cipher out the whys and the
wherefores and the consistencies of it--I haven't got time.

Titian's Venus defiles and disgraces the Tribune, there is no softening
that fact, but his "Moses" glorifies it. The simple truthfulness of
its noble work wins the heart and the applause of every visitor, be he
learned or ignorant. After wearying one's self with the acres of stuffy,
sappy, expressionless babies that populate the canvases of the Old
Masters of Italy, it is refreshing to stand before this peerless child
and feel that thrill which tells you you are at last in the presence of
the real thing. This is a human child, this is genuine. You have seen
him a thousand times--you have seen him just as he is here--and you
confess, without reserve, that Titian WAS a Master. The doll-faces of
other painted babes may mean one thing, they may mean another, but
with the "Moses" the case is different. The most famous of all the
art-critics has said, "There is no room for doubt, here--plainly this
child is in trouble."

I consider that the "Moses" has no equal among the works of the Old
Masters, except it be the divine Hair Trunk of Bassano. I feel sure that
if all the other Old Masters were lost and only these two preserved, the
world would be the gainer by it.

My sole purpose in going to Florence was to see this immortal "Moses,"
and by good fortune I was just in time, for they were already preparing
to remove it to a more private and better-protected place because a
fashion of robbing the great galleries was prevailing in Europe at the
time.

I got a capable artist to copy the picture; Pannemaker, the engraver of
Dor'e's books, engraved it for me, and I have the pleasure of laying it
before the reader in this volume.

We took a turn to Rome and some other Italian cities--then to Munich,
and thence to Paris--partly for exercise, but mainly because these
things were in our projected program, and it was only right that we
should be faithful to it.

From Paris I branched out and walked through Holland and Belgium,
procuring an occasional lift by rail or canal when tired, and I had
a tolerably good time of it "by and large." I worked Spain and other
regions through agents to save time and shoe-leather.

We crossed to England, and then made the homeward passage in the
Cunarder GALLIA, a very fine ship. I was glad to get home--immeasurably
glad; so glad, in fact, that it did not seem possible that anything
could ever get me out of the country again. I had not enjoyed a pleasure
abroad which seemed to me to compare with the pleasure I felt in seeing
New York harbor again. Europe has many advantages which we have not, but
they do not compensate for a good many still more valuable ones which
exist nowhere but in our own country. Then we are such a homeless lot
when we are over there! So are Europeans themselves, for the matter.
They live in dark and chilly vast tombs--costly enough, maybe, but
without conveniences. To be condemned to live as the average European
family lives would make life a pretty heavy burden to the average
American family.

On the whole, I think that short visits to Europe are better for us than
long ones. The former preserve us from becoming Europeanized; they keep
our pride of country intact, and at the same time they intensify our
affection for our country and our people; whereas long visits have the
effect of dulling those feelings--at least in the majority of cases. I
think that one who mixes much with Americans long resident abroad must
arrive at this conclusion.





APPENDIX ----------

Nothing gives such weight and dignity to a book as an Appendix.
HERODOTUS



APPENDIX A The Portier

Omar Khay'am, the poet-prophet of Persia, writing more than eight
hundred years ago, has said:

"In the four parts of the earth are many that are able to write learned
books, many that are able to lead armies, and many also that are able to
govern kingdoms and empires; but few there be that can keep a hotel."

A word about the European hotel PORTIER. He is a most admirable
invention, a most valuable convenience. He always wears a conspicuous
uniform; he can always be found when he is wanted, for he sticks closely
to his post at the front door; he is as polite as a duke; he speaks
from four to ten languages; he is your surest help and refuge in time of
trouble or perplexity. He is not the clerk, he is not the landlord; he
ranks above the clerk, and represents the landlord, who is seldom seen.
Instead of going to the clerk for information, as we do at home, you
go to the portier. It is the pride of our average hotel clerk to know
nothing whatever; it is the pride of the portier to know everything. You
ask the portier at what hours the trains leave--he tells you instantly;
or you ask him who is the best physician in town; or what is the hack
tariff; or how many children the mayor has; or what days the galleries
are open, and whether a permit is required, and where you are to get it,
and what you must pay for it; or when the theaters open and close, what
the plays are to be, and the price of seats; or what is the newest thing
in hats; or how the bills of mortality average; or "who struck Billy
Patterson." It does not matter what you ask him: in nine cases out of
ten he knows, and in the tenth case he will find out for you before you
can turn around three times. There is nothing he will not put his hand
to. Suppose you tell him you wish to go from Hamburg to Peking by the
way of Jericho, and are ignorant of routes and prices--the next morning
he will hand you a piece of paper with the whole thing worked out on it
to the last detail. Before you have been long on European soil, you find
yourself still SAYING you are relying on Providence, but when you come
to look closer you will see that in reality you are relying on the
portier. He discovers what is puzzling you, or what is troubling you,
or what your need is, before you can get the half of it out, and he
promptly says, "Leave that to me." Consequently, you easily drift into
the habit of leaving everything to him. There is a certain embarrassment
about applying to the average American hotel clerk, a certain hesitancy,
a sense of insecurity against rebuff; but you feel no embarrassment in
your intercourse with the portier; he receives your propositions with an
enthusiasm which cheers, and plunges into their accomplishment with an
alacrity which almost inebriates. The more requirements you can pile
upon him, the better he likes it. Of course the result is that you cease
from doing anything for yourself. He calls a hack when you want one;
puts you into it; tells the driver whither to take you; receives you
like a long-lost child when you return; sends you about your business,
does all the quarreling with the hackman himself, and pays him his money
out of his own pocket. He sends for your theater tickets, and pays for
them; he sends for any possible article you can require, be it a doctor,
an elephant, or a postage stamp; and when you leave, at last, you will
find a subordinate seated with the cab-driver who will put you in your
railway compartment, buy your tickets, have your baggage weighed, bring
you the printed tags, and tell you everything is in your bill and paid
for. At home you get such elaborate, excellent, and willing service as
this only in the best hotels of our large cities; but in Europe you get
it in the mere back country-towns just as well.

What is the secret of the portier's devotion? It is very simple: he gets
FEES, AND NO SALARY. His fee is pretty closely regulated, too. If you
stay a week, you give him five marks--a dollar and a quarter, or about
eighteen cents a day. If you stay a month, you reduce this average
somewhat. If you stay two or three months or longer, you cut it down
half, or even more than half. If you stay only one day, you give the
portier a mark.

The head waiter's fee is a shade less than the portier's; the Boots, who
not only blacks your boots and brushes your clothes, but is usually the
porter and handles your baggage, gets a somewhat smaller fee than the
head waiter; the chambermaid's fee ranks below that of the Boots. You
fee only these four, and no one else. A German gentleman told me that
when he remained a week in a hotel, he gave the portier five marks, the
head waiter four, the Boots three, and the chambermaid two; and if he
stayed three months he divided ninety marks among them, in about the
above proportions. Ninety marks make $22.50.

None of these fees are ever paid until you leave the hotel, though it
be a year--except one of these four servants should go away in the mean
time; in that case he will be sure to come and bid you good-by and
give you the opportunity to pay him what is fairly coming to him. It
is considered very bad policy to fee a servant while you are still to
remain longer in the hotel, because if you gave him too little he might
neglect you afterward, and if you gave him too much he might neglect
somebody else to attend to you. It is considered best to keep his
expectations "on a string" until your stay is concluded.

I do not know whether hotel servants in New York get any wages or not,
but I do know that in some of the hotels there the feeing system in
vogue is a heavy burden. The waiter expects a quarter at breakfast--and
gets it. You have a different waiter at luncheon, and so he gets a
quarter. Your waiter at dinner is another stranger--consequently he gets
a quarter. The boy who carries your satchel to your room and lights your
gas fumbles around and hangs around significantly, and you fee him to
get rid of him. Now you may ring for ice-water; and ten minutes later
for a lemonade; and ten minutes afterward, for a cigar; and by and by
for a newspaper--and what is the result? Why, a new boy has appeared
every time and fooled and fumbled around until you have paid him
something. Suppose you boldly put your foot down, and say it is the
hotel's business to pay its servants? You will have to ring your bell
ten or fifteen times before you get a servant there; and when he goes
off to fill your order you will grow old and infirm before you see him
again. You may struggle nobly for twenty-four hours, maybe, if you are
an adamantine sort of person, but in the mean time you will have been
so wretchedly served, and so insolently, that you will haul down your
colors, and go to impoverishing yourself with fees.

It seems to me that it would be a happy idea to import the European
feeing system into America. I believe it would result in getting even
the bells of the Philadelphia hotels answered, and cheerful service
rendered.

The greatest American hotels keep a number of clerks and a cashier, and
pay them salaries which mount up to a considerable total in the course
of a year. The great continental hotels keep a cashier on a trifling
salary, and a portier WHO PAYS THE HOTEL A SALARY. By the latter system
both the hotel and the public save money and are better served than by
our system. One of our consuls told me that a portier of a great Berlin
hotel paid five thousand dollars a year for his position, and yet
cleared six thousand dollars for himself. The position of portier in the
chief hotels of Saratoga, Long Branch, New York, and similar centers of
resort, would be one which the holder could afford to pay even more than
five thousand dollars for, perhaps.

When we borrowed the feeing fashion from Europe a dozen years ago, the
salary system ought to have been discontinued, of course. We might make
this correction now, I should think. And we might add the portier, too.
Since I first began to study the portier, I have had opportunities to
observe him in the chief cities of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy;
and the more I have seen of him the more I have wished that he might be
adopted in America, and become there, as he is in Europe, the stranger's
guardian angel.

Yes, what was true eight hundred years ago, is just as true today: "Few
there be that can keep a hotel." Perhaps it is because the landlords and
their subordinates have in too many cases taken up their trade without
first learning it. In Europe the trade of hotel-keeper is taught. The
apprentice begins at the bottom of the ladder and masters the several
grades one after the other. Just as in our country printing-offices the
apprentice first learns how to sweep out and bring water; then learns
to "roll"; then to sort "pi"; then to set type; and finally rounds
and completes his education with job-work and press-work; so the
landlord-apprentice serves as call-boy; then as under-waiter; then as
a parlor waiter; then as head waiter, in which position he often has to
make out all the bills; then as clerk or cashier; then as portier. His
trade is learned now, and by and by he will assume the style and dignity
of landlord, and be found conducting a hotel of his own.

Now in Europe, the same as in America, when a man has kept a hotel
so thoroughly well during a number of years as to give it a great
reputation, he has his reward. He can live prosperously on that
reputation. He can let his hotel run down to the last degree of
shabbiness and yet have it full of people all the time. For instance,
there is the Hôtel de Ville, in Milan. It swarms with mice and fleas,
and if the rest of the world were destroyed it could furnish dirt enough
to start another one with. The food would create an insurrection in a
poorhouse; and yet if you go outside to get your meals that hotel makes
up its loss by overcharging you on all sorts of trifles--and without
making any denials or excuses about it, either. But the Hôtel de
Ville's old excellent reputation still keeps its dreary rooms crowded
with travelers who would be elsewhere if they had only some wise friend
to warn them.



APPENDIX B Heidelberg Castle

Heidelberg Castle must have been very beautiful before the French
battered and bruised and scorched it two hundred years ago. The stone
is brown, with a pinkish tint, and does not seem to stain easily. The
dainty and elaborate ornamentation upon its two chief fronts is as
delicately carved as if it had been intended for the interior of a
drawing-room rather than for the outside of a house. Many fruit and
flower clusters, human heads and grim projecting lions' heads are still
as perfect in every detail as if they were new. But the statues which
are ranked between the windows have suffered. These are life-size
statues of old-time emperors, electors, and similar grandees, clad in
mail and bearing ponderous swords. Some have lost an arm, some a head,
and one poor fellow is chopped off at the middle. There is a saying that
if a stranger will pass over the drawbridge and walk across the court to
the castle front without saying anything, he can made a wish and it will
be fulfilled. But they say that the truth of this thing has never had
a chance to be proved, for the reason that before any stranger can walk
from the drawbridge to the appointed place, the beauty of the palace
front will extort an exclamation of delight from him.

A ruin must be rightly situated, to be effective. This one could not
have been better placed. It stands upon a commanding elevation, it is
buried in green words, there is no level ground about it, but, on the
contrary, there are wooded terraces upon terraces, and one looks down
through shining leaves into profound chasms and abysses where twilight
reigns and the sun cannot intrude. Nature knows how to garnish a ruin to
get the best effect. One of these old towers is split down the middle,
and one half has tumbled aside. It tumbled in such a way as to establish
itself in a picturesque attitude. Then all it lacked was a fitting
drapery, and Nature has furnished that; she has robed the rugged mass in
flowers and verdure, and made it a charm to the eye. The standing half
exposes its arched and cavernous rooms to you, like open, toothless
mouths; there, too, the vines and flowers have done their work of grace.
The rear portion of the tower has not been neglected, either, but is
clothed with a clinging garment of polished ivy which hides the wounds
and stains of time. Even the top is not left bare, but is crowned with a
flourishing group of trees and shrubs. Misfortune has done for this old
tower what it has done for the human character sometimes--improved it.

A gentleman remarked, one day, that it might have been fine to live in
the castle in the day of its prime, but that we had one advantage which
its vanished inhabitants lacked--the advantage of having a charming ruin
to visit and muse over. But that was a hasty idea. Those people had the
advantage of US. They had the fine castle to live in, and they could
cross the Rhine valley and muse over the stately ruin of Trifels
besides. The Trifels people, in their day, five hundred years ago, could
go and muse over majestic ruins that have vanished, now, to the last
stone. There have always been ruins, no doubt; and there have always
been pensive people to sigh over them, and asses to scratch upon them
their names and the important date of their visit. Within a hundred
years after Adam left Eden, the guide probably gave the usual general
flourish with his hand and said: "Place where the animals were named,
ladies and gentlemen; place where the tree of the forbidden fruit stood;
exact spot where Adam and Eve first met; and here, ladies and gentlemen,
adorned and hallowed by the names and addresses of three generations of
tourists, we have the crumbling remains of Cain's altar--fine old ruin!"
Then, no doubt, he taxed them a shekel apiece and let them go.

An illumination of Heidelberg Castle is one of the sights of Europe.
The Castle's picturesque shape; its commanding situation, midway up the
steep and wooded mountainside; its vast size--these features combine to
make an illumination a most effective spectacle. It is necessarily an
expensive show, and consequently rather infrequent. Therefore whenever
one of these exhibitions is to take place, the news goes about in the
papers and Heidelberg is sure to be full of people on that night. I and
my agent had one of these opportunities, and improved it.

About half past seven on the appointed evening we crossed the lower
bridge, with some American students, in a pouring rain, and started up
the road which borders the Neunheim side of the river. This roadway was
densely packed with carriages and foot-passengers; the former of all
ages, and the latter of all ages and both sexes. This black and solid
mass was struggling painfully onward, through the slop, the darkness,
and the deluge. We waded along for three-quarters of a mile, and finally
took up a position in an unsheltered beer-garden directly opposite
the Castle. We could not SEE the Castle--or anything else, for that
matter--but we could dimly discern the outlines of the mountain over the
way, through the pervading blackness, and knew whereabouts the Castle
was located. We stood on one of the hundred benches in the garden, under
our umbrellas; the other ninety-nine were occupied by standing men and
women, and they also had umbrellas. All the region round about, and up
and down the river-road, was a dense wilderness of humanity hidden
under an unbroken pavement of carriage tops and umbrellas. Thus we stood
during two drenching hours. No rain fell on my head, but the converging
whalebone points of a dozen neighboring umbrellas poured little cooling
steams of water down my neck, and sometimes into my ears, and thus kept
me from getting hot and impatient. I had the rheumatism, too, and
had heard that this was good for it. Afterward, however, I was led to
believe that the water treatment is NOT good for rheumatism. There were
even little girls in that dreadful place. A men held one in his arms,
just in front of me, for as much as an hour, with umbrella-drippings
soaking into her clothing all the time.