Chapter III: Part 3

Now with St. Peter’s it was different. I have seen some right nice churches in America, but of course they do not come up to European cathedrals. St. Paul’s in London was disappointing, and Notre Dame in Paris was not up to the advance advertising. But when it comes to impressiveness St. Peter’s at Rome is to my mind the greatest imaginable. It is so big and yet so proportioned, so grand and yet so substantial, so full of precious memories of martyrs and divines and so tastefully and magnificently decorated with pictures that tell the story of the faith it stands for. All the people in Hutchinson could worship in one side of St. Peter’s, and yet there is none of that barny, barracksy look which usually goes with great size and capacity. The length is 232 yards, the transept is 150 yards and the height of the nave 151 feet, the dome is 435 feet to the cross. But figures don’t tell anything about St. Peter’s. The interior is tapestry and painting, gold without tinsel, pictures without tawdry effect, and columns that add and do not detract from the dignity of the structure. Under the great dome is the tomb of Peter, the disciple who made so much trouble, but knowing his energy and power, whom Christ made the rock upon which the church was to be built.

Next door to St. Peter’s is the Vatican, where the pope resides, and the first thing we saw there was the Sistine Chapel. Here is where my view-point differs from most people. I concede that the paintings in the Sistine Chapel are beautiful, especially in their design and their color. The old masters who did the work under the direction of Michael Angelo have never been equaled in their ability to make rich color. But I contend that the subject of a picture should count as well as the drawing and the color. When Michael Angelo attempted to paint God Almighty he couldn’t do it. The color is all right and the proportions are perfect, but all that Michael Angelo did was to paint a man a little larger than Adam, and that does not come up to my ideal of the Divine. The fact is that neither Michael Angelo nor anyone else can put onto canvas such a subject, and therefore Michael should not have tried it. His fault was in his judgment of what can be painted. The entire effect of the remainder of the beautiful ceilings and walls with their paintings of scenes from Old and New Testament, was spoiled for me when I couldn’t get away from that central figure, that failure of ability to do the impossible.

I would like to have the support of the women-folks in my theory in regard to the failure of the Sistine Chapel, so I will add that in the picture where Michael paints the devil, he makes the devil half snake and the upper half a woman. If I remember correctly, the great painter was an old bachelor,—probably not one of his own motion.

The paintings mix up the pagan with the Christian. “The Last Judgment” has Christ the central figure as judge, surrounded by apostles and saints, and the hell part of the painting is according to Dante, with the old Roman idea of the boatman Charon ferrying the lost across the river. In this picture Michael Angelo made a hit. He put the face of an enemy of his, an officer of the pope, on the painting of Minos, one of the leading devils of hell. The offending official had objected to some of the artist’s work on account of the nudity of the figures, and Michael has sent him down the ages as the face of a devil.

But there is no call for me to describe paintings and statuary and cathedrals. A hasty sketch like this is not giving them fair treatment. You can’t go anywhere in Rome without running into something beautiful or something historic. Go down a street and there will be the baths of Diocletian, turn around and there will be the Forum, and next is the Coliseum, the Arch of Constantine, Trajan’s forum and column, the Palace of Tiberius, the Stadium, and so on until you can’t rest with the long list of things you saw and ought to remember, and some that you ought to have seen but didn’t because you were just too tired to look around. The Forum, the Coliseum and all this kind of things look just like the pictures, and they are there,—that’s all I can say about them, although the feeling of actually having seen and touched is one of a great deal of satisfaction and worth going to Rome to have.

I don’t know how many churches there are in Rome. There are eighty dedicated to the Virgin and fully as many to St. Peter. They are filled with great paintings and statuary. Rome is the center of the greatest Christian church, and for centuries the civilized world, or a large part of it, has sent its gifts to the temples and shrines. Thousands and tens of thousands of young men are studying here for the priesthood. The streets are filled with their black gowns and hats. Here and there along the streets and roads are shrines erected to patron saints. All the churches are open seven days in the week, and there are always people in them at their devotions.

As a contrast to the power and greatness of the present church we went to see the catacombs, the burrows in the earth to which the Christians of the early centuries fled for safety, and in which they buried their dead. The catacombs of St. Calixtus, which we visited are said to contain twelve miles of underground passages. Along the sides and in the occasional niches and chapels are the places where the bodies were put. The passages go down thirty to forty feet and the catacombs are from four to six stories downward, just as a building is that much above ground. In these places the early Christians kept alive their faith under the terrible persecution of the emperors. Amid the tombs they met and worshipped in spite of imperial decree and certain death if captured. Rude pictures and inscriptions on the walls tell part of the story which has made the world wonder ever since as the Roman government did then, at the power of the faith for which men and women would so live and so die.

Coming out of the catacombs we drove along the Appian Way, the great military road constructed over 300 years B. C. I had expected to have a good thrill of enthusiasm over the Appian Way, but somehow it did not come. The Appian Way is an ordinary good country road lined with old houses, wine gardens, ruins and high fences. There are still a number of villas and palaces, but the owners are poor and the basements are usually rented out for stables and the upper apartments for tenements. Italian noblemen are generally poor, and if they have palaces are obliged to rent rooms and keep boarders.

Another cherished hope of mine is gone. I had read about the beautiful Italian peasant girls and have seen them on the stage singing in opera and dressed in fetching short skirts and bright-colored bodices. Italian girls work in the fields with the boys and then help their mothers with the children, and most of them look tired and sickly. The fetching skirts hang like loose wall-paper and the “bright bodice” looks as if the girl was wearing her mother’s old corset outside her clothes.

The largest and most numerous ruins in Rome are those of the public baths erected by the state and by the emperors. The Romans in those days were sporty, banqueted all night and bathed all next day to get over the effects. But there are no public baths now—at least none of consequence. And judging by the ordinary senses of sight and smell, bathing has become one of the lost arts with a large number of the Romans of to-day.

VENICE, THE BEAUTIFUL.

VENICE, July 3, 1905.

I suppose everybody knows about Venice, the city built in the water. During the sixth century the “barbarians” from the north were overrunning Italy, killing or making slaves of the people and destroying the cities and towns. A number of the inhabitants of northeast Italy fled for safety to a group of small islands in the shallow bay of the Adriatic sea, and there built up little villages which were united in a republic and became the city and suburbs which we call Venice. They naturally were a seafaring and trading people, and Venice was the port of commerce between the Orient and Europe. The Crusades stimulated business, and Venice was the most important trading-point on the Mediterranean. At that time there was no Suez canal and no knowledge of an ocean route to Asia, and all commerce passed through Venice. The little republic grew strong and powerful, captured and retained possessions in Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean. Venice was one of the powers of Europe about the fifteenth century, and thought she had the world by the tail. But the Turks captured Constantinople, other routes to Asia were discovered about the time Columbus reached America, and Venice as a great political power and business center suffered a collapse. In other words, the boom in Venice busted and Venice has never done much on her own account since. The first few hundred years the government was that of a republic, but about the close of the thirteenth century the nobles who had won leadership through trade and war declared their offices hereditary, and thereafter Venice was an aristocracy with a president called “the doge.” During the French Revolution the French captured Venice, and then Austria got it, and finally, in 1868, it was united with the kingdom of Italy, where it belongs.

Built on islands, crossed by canals like streets in other cities, without a carriage or a horse, Venice is a strange, and to me, an attractive place. The railroad runs out on a long trestle bridge. It is hardly appropriate to say “landed” in a place like Venice, but we arrived here at ten o’clock at night. The porter for the hotel to which we were going took us through the station and put us into a gondola, and away we went, down back streets and under bridges, with no light except a few corner lamps and the stars. The Venetian gondoliers may be poetical, but their looks do not invite the confidence of the traveler when he intrusts himself to their hands for the first time and late at night. Little chills creep up and down your back as you see the gondola going straight for a corner—sure to hit it, but accidentally doesn’t. After you get acquainted with the ways of the city you learn to trust the gondolier, but the first time, late at night, you have your doubts. You may forget just how you arrived in other cities, but not in Venice.

The Grand canal, the main street in Venice, is about seventy-five yards wide and averages sixteen feet deep. The paving question does not bother the city council in Venice. Most of their canal streets are only twelve to thirty feet in width. There are also a few real streets four to ten feet wide, on the inside of the blocks formed by the canals, and the total result is a labyrinth of alleys and canals which are impossible for a stranger to get head or tail of. Along the Grand canal and many others the fine houses of the old prosperous times loom up straight from the water six or seven stories. For example, the front of our hotel, on the Grand canal, has absolutely no sidewalk, only marble steps leading to the water, up which the tide rises about two and a half feet twice a day. The architecture of Venice is Oriental, and is refreshing after the Roman and Greek styles everywhere else in Italy. The churches and public buildings, mostly constructed between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, have round Moorish towers and are decorated with gold and colors and have very ornate pillars and façades. That makes Venice a beautiful city, and so it is,—if you don’t go into the little back alleys where you see the undecorated side. Of the 125,000 people one-fourth have no means of support except charity. In the last few years Venice has revived the glass industry and has developed the lace-making, and times are better than they were. But just think of a people where one-fourth have no chance to earn their living! We visited one of the big lace-making suburbs on the island of Burano. The lace, which Mrs. Morgan says is “b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l” and over which all good women rave, is made by girls and women who sit all day on straight-back chairs and labor over the pillow,—and get about twenty-five cents a day wages. We visited the glass-blowers at Murano, the finest in the world, and skilled workmen get up to two dollars a day for a dexterity and ability which would easily command three or four times that amount in America. The people live mostly on fish and vegetables, are very poor and apparently very happy. They are the best-looking folks I have seen in Italy, and evidently enjoy the improvident life which would drive an American to strong drink, or if he were in Italy would drive him to drink the water.

The center of Venice is “the Piazza of St. Mark,” a square about two hundred yards long and nearly half as wide, paved with marble and inclosed by fine buildings, including the great Church of St. Mark, the old palace of the doge, the present royal palace, and a glittering array of shops. I should say there were ten thousand beautiful shops in Venice selling lace, glass, art works, beads, curios, pictures, etc. Of course there are not that many, but there seem to be. There is practically nothing else of importance. Venice is a good deal like the world’s fair grounds, all glitter and glass, Oriental towers and marble palaces, beautiful bridges and lagoons, and everybody trying to separate the stranger from his money.

Venice is a night town. In the evening the canals are filled with gondolas and everybody is out for a good time. Regular musical clubs drift along with the sweetest Italian opera rendered with real ability, and arias and Italian serenades and love songs until you think the world is nothing but lights glancing on the water, drifting gondolas, song and gladness. Every few minutes one of the singers will pass the hat and you contribute two or three cents and remember you are still on earth. We sit at our hotel and watch the gay crowd in the passing gondolas, or for a few cents get into one, lean back on the easy cushions, smoke a two-cent cigar, and forget all about these poor people with their poverty and their fleas. They have forgotten them themselves.

The patron saint of Venice is St. Mark. In the early days, say a thousand years ago and more, some doge dreamed that Venice would never prosper until the bones of St. Mark were brought here for burial. The bones happened to be in Asia or Africa, and for years the Venetians put in their time fighting the Turks and trying to capture the relics. Finally the bright idea struck them that it would be easier to steal St. Mark’s bones than capture them by battle, and an enterprising Venetian merchant did the job. The remains of St. Mark were brought to Venice and a beautiful cathedral with Oriental towers and rich colors built above them. The doge’s dream was no fake, for after that Venice prospered greatly. Tradition says that St. Mark used to have a winged lion for a companion, and accordingly the winged lion is the Venetian emblem. The cathedral and the public buildings are full of Oriental works of art captured or stolen from the Turks during the years of the Crusades when Venice was a stronghold of Christendom. Venetian painters have done St. Mark and the lion in every conceivable place, and wherever you go you see his kindly face, the quill pen he used in writing, and the playful winged lion. The only horses in the city are of bronze, and decorate the façade of St. Mark’s cathedral. Except for these rather poor imitations I suppose nine-tenths of the people of Venice never saw a horse. Incidentally I will add that it is a great advantage to live in a city where you are not awakened at daylight by the rumble of wagons and carts over stone-paved streets.

The government of Venice during the Middle Ages was something fierce. Nominally a republic, it was controlled by the nobles, who had a general assembly, which selected a senate of seventy-five, of which there was an inner council of ten and a secret tribunal of three, who met masked and did not know each other’s identity. If you lived in Venice at that time and had an enemy you wanted to do away with, you would drop a letter accusing him of treason into the letter-box shaped like a lion’s head in the counter outside the room of the council of three. It was a pretty sure thing that he would not be heard from again. Of course you would have to do this first, for your enemy might be dropping in a letter while you were thinking about it.

We went through the rooms of the various councils down the secret stairway and over the “Bridge of Sighs,” which connected the palace with the prison across the canal street. This was the way the prisoners were brought for trial, and if they went back it was to torture and death. The jails in those times were not built for health or sanitary purposes, and were evidently not examined by the county commissioners. The dungeons are dark and damp, and the guide tells you some awful stories of the rack, the thumbscrew and the block. You can imagine the “good old days” and shudder as you think of the cruelty and the crime. Paraphrasing Byron, who wrote some lines on the subject:

I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,
Visions of Old from those deep dungeons rise,—
The shrieks of pain, the terrifying cries,
Then I reflect: Perhaps it’s mostly lies.

SOME THINGS ON ART.

VENICE, ITALY, July 3, 1905.

Because I have not been writing much to The News on the subject of art, it must not be supposed that I am omitting the regular work of every tourist. Nor do I want it presupposed that I don’t know enough about art to tell the difference between a renaissance and a vermicelli. If industry and a desire to thoroughly do the job so it will not have to be done a second time will count for anything, I have been an arduous lover of art in all its forms since I passed the custom-house on the Italian border. Everybody knows that the center of art is Italy and that anything that isn’t old and Italian is second-class. When you come to Italy you expect to see the heights of the artistic and you are expected to have fits of ecstasy over the said heights. I have had ’em every time the guidebook told me to. I have endeavored in every way to show that a plain, common citizen of Kansas knew what to do when brought face to face with Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo and the other gentlemen since whose death the world has never really seen much in art. According to my pedometer I have traveled through 171 miles of cathedrals, 56 miles of public buildings and 85 miles of art galleries—all in ten days. Some people may think my pedometer is too rapid, but I know it is too slow. You know a good bird dog learns never to “set” for anything but a game bird. And it is well established that people with a certain kind of rheumatism can tell the approaching changes in the weather by the twinges in their joints. And it is a fact that even when I do not know there is a cathedral or an art gallery within a hundred miles, let me approach one accidentally and my feet will begin to ache. Then I know what is before me and I try to do my duty. If the work of absorbing Italian art should prove too much for me, the words could be as appropriately put on my tombstone as they were over the early citizen of Dodge who died with a dozen bullets in his body and a half-dozen enemies lying on the floor:

HERE LIES BILL.
HE DONE HIS DAMDEST.
ANGELS COULD DO
NO MORE.

There are three places where you always find art in Italy: First and foremost, the churches; second, the public buildings; third, the art galleries and museums. The churches come first, because the Catholic Church has always been the support and promoter of art. For centuries it was the only strong power that encouraged artists. It had the tasteful men of the age and it had the money. The great artists both in painting and sculpture would have had no opportunity and their works would have been destroyed if it had not been for the church. In return, the artists took the subjects of religion and portrayed them most beautifully and effectively. There is hardly a church in Italy which does not have paintings by some of those old painters which would be worth a fortune now if they were for sale. The Catholic faith especially appeals to the artistic sense, and the history of the church furnished a boundless field of subjects. Walls and ceilings of churches are covered with magnificent pictures, the exteriors are decorated with sculpture, and the architecture of the buildings is brilliant and effective. To see paintings, statues or architecture in Italy you first go to the churches, and there you see the greatest and best.

After the churches the art treasures and galleries are found in the public buildings, and there we get what is left of the art of Greece and Rome, together with much of a later time. The old pagan mythology furnished most of the ancient art, together with a few attempts at transferring abstract ideas into concrete form. Of course I don’t want to set up as an art critic—I have trouble enough without that. But according to the way I was raised, a large per cent. of ancient sculpture isn’t fit to be exhibited to young folks—or to old men. Probably the times were different and fashions in art were acute, but the Grecian and Roman sculptors paid no attention to the rules of common decency as generally understood in this generation. While doing my duty in the art galleries I have actually blushed so much that it grew noticeable to the other art critics, and I fear that I lost standing with them. Of course I am not a regular critic, but I know a few things, and this is one of them.

Another objection I have to the old masters is that they never considered any subject too big for them. I have written something of this when I kicked on Michael Angelo attempting to make a picture of God Almighty. There is too much of that kind of business in Italian art. And another thing is that they couldn’t paint good animals. Some of the pictures by the great masters have horses or lions in them, and I believe even the horses would laugh at their own appearance.

Aside from these unimportant objections and a trifling criticism of a great deal of ignorance about drawing and the fitness of things, the “old masters,” by which is meant the great painters from about 1400 to 1600, are certainly worthy of their reputation. Everybody I met knew more about art than I did—so they thought—and everyone said: “What wonderful color.” The old masters certainly did know how to mix paints so as to make the most beautiful and most lasting colors. I think Titian’s red-headed girls are the prettiest reds I have ever seen. Raphael’s paintings cannot be criticized by me—their feeling and their execution will make a cynical Kansan stand and admire. Michael Angelo I did not take to so well as I did Titian and Raphael, but he did a lot of work, and he, too, had the ability to make his pictures like life. The other great painters of Italy in these two centuries of the renaissance have not been equaled in any period since, and in spite of the fact that the experience of one generation ought to help the next, I do not believe that the modern Italian painters, or the Englishmen and Americans who go to Italy and copy, can come within several blocks of equaling the work of the “old masters.”

There is one more objection I have to the “old masters,” and I would like to tell it to their faces. They had the habit of taking a great subject and making it a means of flattery for wealthy patrons. For example, a picture of Christ or the Virgin sitting and talking confidentially with some old scamp of a Medici. Of course I don’t blame the old artists. The Medici were a lot of thugs, thieves, highwaymen, murderers, and lovers of art. They put up handsomely for the great masters, and undoubtedly assisted much in promoting art at a time when the princes and nobility of Italy were not respectable according to our standard. This flattery by the old masters may have been necessary to make a living, but I don’t think it is Art.

I had one objection which has been overruled on the ground that it was simply because my apprenticeship in art had been too short. Every artist painted a “Madonna.” Each had a different ideal or model. Mary was a Jewess. But the Italian artists nearly all ran in pictures of Italians, and each had a different style. It makes a confusing aggregation. I think I have seen a thousand Madonnas, five hundred Magdalens, and from one to three hundred of each of the saints. There is a sameness of subject and a variance in execution which makes me a little nervous. I haven’t worked at the art business as long as I should, and therefore I may be too hasty in my judgment, although I am fairly perspiring art at every pore and the climate of Italy in the latter part of June and the first of July has nearly as much cause for perspiration as the climate of Kansas.

AN ITALIAN FOURTH AND SO FORTH.

MENAGIO, ITALY, July 5, 1905.

At an early hour yesterday morning, July 4, we left the hotel in Venice in a gondola, and defiantly waving in the air was an American flag which I carried as proudly and as exuberantly as a ten-year-old boy would at a picnic in Kansas. We met several Americans at the station, and they waved and cheered “Old Glory.” We met all kinds of Italians, who looked as amused and curious as a lot of Americans would at an Italian carrying a green, white and red banner down the streets of Hutchinson. I flaunted the stars and stripes in the faces of the Italian policemen, and they seemed to enjoy it. Several people tried to find out from me what it all meant, and in spite of the fact that I told them in good English that this was the Fourth of July, the anniversary of independence, they shook their heads and did not “comprehendo.” The weather was very hot and very dry, the train was dusty, and the conditions as near ideal for a successful Fourth of July celebration as could be imagined. The American flag that day floated in the Italian breeze from Venice to Milan and then to Lake Como. The inability to make the Dagoes understand what I meant was embarrassing at times, and I longed vainly for a pack of firecrackers or a few good torpedoes. The conductor on the train was greatly interested. We talked in sign language and all the Italian I knew and all the English he knew, but to no effect. Finally I said the word “liberty,” and as the Italian word is about the same, he caught on and I could tell he was approving. “Vive l’America!” I cried, and he took off his hat and said it after me and smiled agreement to the remarks I was making on what the old flag meant. I gave him a big tip, 10 cents,—5 cents for hurrahing for America and 5 cents for listening to my speech.

To-night we are out of the heat of the fertile plains of Lombardy and are in a delightful cool place on the shore of Lake Como, the prettiest and pleasantest place I have seen since we left Killarney. The last part of the day the flag waved over Como, Bellagio, Cernobio, Nesso, Colomo, Bellano, and all the other “o’s” that make the list of Italian towns look like the roster of an Irish Fenian society, only the o is at the wrong end of the names.

Speaking of “tipping” the conductor reminds me of the tipping system in Italy, which is a subject of the greatest importance to the traveler. I think I have seen only one man in Italy who did not hold out his hand, and that was an armless beggar at the Milan station who had a tin cup in which you were expected to deposit. The tipping custom is general in Europe, but it reaches its greatest development in Italy. Everybody you meet is so courteous and polite, willing to show you or tell you or take you, but always expecting something. You tip the conductor, the porter, the hotel manager, the chambermaid, the “man chambermaid,” the elevator boy, the waiter, the head waiter, the clerk, the interpreter, the attendants, the driver, the man who opens the door, the church janitor, the policeman, and everybody you ask a question or who is there to answer if you do ask, and then you tip a few more just because they expect it. This looks like an alarming expenditure of money. But as a matter of fact the total amount of tips is not more than is expected at a big hotel in New York. And when you tip the waiter at the restaurant he does not keep it, but all tips go into a common fund that is divided and is the wages the waiters receive in most cases.

Here is a schedule of “tips,” which, after considerable study and comparison with that of others, I have figured as about right:

Baggageman, 2 cents.
Elevator boy, 2 cents.
Chambermaid, 3 cents.
Man chambermaid, 3 cents.
Waiter, per day, 5 cents.
Head waiter, 10 cents.
Manager of hotel, 20 cents.
Miscellaneous men and boys, each 1 cent.
Railroad conductor, 5 cents.
Policeman, 2 cents.
Driver, 2 cents.
Italian nobleman, 3 cents.
Italian merchant, 2 cents.
Clerk in store, 1 cent.
Ordinary civility, 1 cent.

I haven’t met the king or queen, but I estimate that if I did and asked a favor they would look like about 30 cents.

The Italian money is like the French money, based on a unit which is equivalent to 20 cents. So when you give a man 10 cents you give him a half-lire or half-franc. The lire is divided into 100 centimes, and when you give a man 2 cents you hand him a great big copper coin with “ten centimes” on it. This small unit of measurement causes an American a peculiar sensation. For example, I had to buy a shirt in Venice and it was marked 5.50. That looked like a big price for a shirt, but reduced to American currency it was only $1.10. I bought some of the long Italian cigars which look like stogies and have straws down the center so they will draw. They were 30 centimes each—only 6 cents American. For a carriage and driver to go anywhere in Rome, carrying Mrs. Morgan and myself and a lot of baggage, it was 1.00, twenty American cents. When two Americans can ride a couple of miles in a comfortable victoria for 20 cents they don’t walk much, and they feel as if they were beating somebody and are perfectly willing to “tip” the driver an extra 2 cents. So when you are “doing” Italy and get used to the custom, you do not mind carrying a pound or so of copper coins and distributing them whenever you speak to a native.

The effect of this custom on the people must be very pernicious. And it takes away the charm of recognizing courtesy and hospitality as a national trait when you remember that you pay for it and it is cheap.

I wrote from Paris that the government of France has the monopoly of the tobacco business. In Italy the government has the monopoly of tobacco and salt, the two great necessities. It looks funny to go along the street and see the little government shops with the sign in Italian, “Tobacco and Salt.” The Italian government doesn’t sell good tobacco or good salt. The best cigars are from the island of Luzon, manufactured into alleged cigars in the government factories in Italy. The salt is heavy and coarse, something like old-style yellow-brown sugar. If you don’t like the tobacco or the salt you can go without, for the government allows no competitor who might do better.

I have learned a little Italian, not so much but I can forget it when I cross the line. And that leads me to tell of a little experience with a moral. I had been so annoyed by the numerous beggars and vendors of trinkets that I asked a hotel porter who knew some English what I should say in Italian to tell them to go away. He told me something that sounded like “Muffa tora.” Accordingly I went around for a couple of days saying “Muffa tora” to all that bothered me. Then a friend who knew a little more Italian happened to hear me and suggested that my language was too strong. The words were about what in America is meant by “Go-to-hell.” And there I had been going around St. Peter’s, St. Paul, and all the churches and art galleries in Rome, saying to half the people who approached me, “Go-to-hell,” “Go-to-hell.” A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Of course Americans stop at the best hotels, and they are about the same everywhere, being based on the French model. They are from one-third to one-half cheaper than the best hotels in American cities. We are supposed to get three meals a day: First, rolls and coffee; second, about 12 o’clock, what is really a late breakfast but is called “dejeuner” and has three to five courses: eggs (always—generally omelet), macaroni, a cutlet or chop with potatoes, a roast meat, cheese, and fruit. No coffee or tea or anything to drink except water, which they say is bad and unhealthful. Dinner at 7 o’clock and a good meal: Soup, fish, cutlet or chop with macaroni, roast, vegetables, roast chicken and salad, cheese, small cakes, and fruit. No coffee or tea. If you want coffee after dinner you have it served in the lounging-room or out-of-doors, and it is extra. Nobody but Americans drink water, and they do not use enough to hurt. When you enter the hotel you are received by the “hall porter,” really the manager, who bows and takes you or sends you to a room. After a while he sends up for your name and nationality, but that is for the police. There is no hotel register. When you pay your bill and are leaving the porter rings a bell and everybody from proprietor to chambermaid appears to say “good-by,” speed the parting guest and receive the parting tips. At first your royal reception and leave-taking makes quite an impression and you feel “set up,” but after a while it gets to be a bore and you try to escape it but can’t. The cooking and service are first-class, better than in America. There is one kind of dishes I steer clear of, those labeled on the bill of fare, “a la Americaine.” They are like those served in Hutchinson, “a la Italia,” or “a la Français,” which means that they are probably spoiled by the cook trying to do something he does not understand.

Of course in the small Italian hotels the cooking is different, but they tell me it is good. The restaurants where the poorer people eat are full of garlicky smells which can be heard for a block. The staple articles of food for Italians are soup, macaroni and vegetables, all flavored with garlic. The ordinary Italian does not eat meat. There are probably several reasons why, but the first one is that he has not the price, and that is enough. When a man is working for 30 cents a day he is a stranger to roast beef, for meat is as high as it is in America.

I haven’t seen a real clothing store in Italy. There are two classes of Italians only: The rich, who have a tailor, and the poor, who put the goods together themselves. Again I want to repeat what I have said before: The things that are cheap in Europe are those in which labor is the principal factor. When it comes to hiring a man to do work, you name your price. That is why carriage-driving, servants, clothes-making, the building trades and labor of every kind from lace-makers to railroad engineers, are so low.

The Italian shopkeepers have a well-deserved reputation as bargainers. Go into a shop, ask a price, and very likely the proprietor or clerk will say “So much: what will you give?” Americans have a reputation of being “easy,” and so they usually start us with a price of “6 francs,” when they will come down to one or two rather than lose a sale. When you get through you never know just how much you have been beaten—you only know you have been. Some stores advertise “fixed prices,” but they are unfixed if necessary. The process of “shopping” thus has another and delicious feature for the American “shopper.”

I have found the Italians honest. We hardly ever lock our room. I am always leaving the umbrella, but somebody always finds it and brings it to me, and I can’t say that much for Americans. The hackmen do not overcharge, or at least not near as much as in Chicago or New York. I think a stranger is better treated in Rome than in Kansas City. But then comes the suspicious thought—we pay for it.

Previous to this trip I had often heard people talk about the fleas in Italy, and had thought it was very funny. It is no joke. At first I was much amused when I would see a well-dressed lady stop suddenly on the street, elevate her skirt and go hunting. I now consider it a perfectly justifiable and proper action. If there is a game law in Italy with a closed season on fleas it is not at this time of the year. I have seen the anxious, heart-stricken look on the faces of the martyrs and saints as painted by the old masters, and I know now where they got their models, for I have seen the man and the woman conscious of the march of the flea along the small of the back or in some other unreachable place, and have seen the haunted, hunted look on the face as conjecture what the flea would do next changed into realization. The Italian flea works a good deal like the American mosquito, only he makes no music and you can only tell where he is by sad experience. He can dodge better than some politicians and he can get in his work early and often. I am growing accustomed to the sensation myself, but I do not think I shall ever enjoy it. The Bible says the wicked flee when no man pursueth, but in Italy the wicked flea is improving each minute whether anyone pursueth or not. Mingled with art and old masters, lagoons, and gondolas, cathedrals and Cæsars, blue sky and green fields, will always be my recollection of the flea that never takes a siesta and to whom the poets have never done justice.

SWITZERLAND.

ACROSS THE ALPS.

BRIEG, SWITZERLAND, July 7, 1905.

“Beyond the Alps lies Italy” with all of its art and history and fleas. After a day on Lake Lugano and Lake Maggiore, where the two countries of Italy and Switzerland meet, and where the customs officers examined our baggage three times in the course of a trip around the water, we crossed the Alps, among which we had been for two days, and are now in the oldest republic on earth, Switzerland. We came over the Simplon Pass in a stage-coach and not through a tunnel, as we could have done. The Simplon Pass is historic and picturesque. As soon as the tunnel is completed, which has been seven years in building, the railroad train will rush through the mountains and the stage-coach will be an old fogy luxury. But the way to go over the Alps for pleasure and observation is not to take a tunnel train, but ride over on the outside of a coach with five horses and see the panorama as you pass by. After a fortnight spent among the great works of man, cathedrals, coliseums and galleries, one day was enough in the Simplon to prove that Nature is still ahead. The great amphitheatres of the mountains, the magnificent stage-settings of forest and peak, left the coliseum and the forum far behind. The changing hues of the slopes, now gradual and now precipitate, sometimes bare and sometimes covered with pasture and vineyard or forest, were in colors which even the old masters could not equal. It was an all-day drive over a fine road, through narrow gulches, alongside rushing rivers, under waterfalls of melted snow, finally through the snow itself, and then down, almost sliding, with the coach-wheels locked so they were like runners, into the quaint little town of Brieg.

The road over the Simplon was built by Napoleon. All over the map of Europe you will see such monuments to the name of the great emperor. I do not give Napoleon much credit for the job, as it was a military necessity to him. He had to keep an army in Italy and always be on the lookout for his enemies there, so he ordered the Simplon Pass, up to the time only a trail, to be provided with a macadamized road, and it was done. I have seen so many of such roads in Europe that I would be willing to support Napoleon for road overseer or street commissioner any time. The road was completed in 1807, and the tunnel under the Pass will be finished in 1906. It is sixteen miles long, large enough for a double track, and has been constructed from both ends at the same time. To my mind it is a great engineering feat to start two small holes in a mountain, sixteen miles apart, and figure so accurately that those holes will meet some place in the center over a mile from the daylight on top. I suppose it looks easy to the engineer who knows how, but it is miraculous to me. A good many lives have been lost and a lot of money spent on this tunnel, but those are the sacrifices the world demands before it will move on.

The road over the Pass is forty-five miles long. Soon after starting, all agriculture disappeared, except vineyards and pasture. The vineyards continued almost up to the snow. Wherever there was enough ground there were vines, and in many places the mountain-side was terraced and in the made land the vines were growing profusely. Literally speaking, there are mountains of vineyards in northern Italy and in Switzerland.

Cattle-raising in the Alps is done in small herds and is mostly on the Swiss side. The stock looks smooth and fine. Along with a drove of cows are always a few goats. In the early summer the herdsmen drive the animals up the paths and trails to the little patches of rich pasture, where they feed until fall, neither man nor beast coming down until driven by the cold. I saw cattle pasturing on the mountain-side where it was so steep it seemed they must have feet like flies or they would tumble down. Of course the animals inherit the mountain knowledge, and I suppose they don’t know there is such a thing as a level meadow. Here and there men and women would be cutting grass with a scythe, spreading the hay out to dry, and then actually rolling it down the mountain-side. Like all people who live in mountainous countries, the Swiss herdsmen along the Simplon looked intelligent, cheerful and poor.

And that brings me to another broken idol. I had always heard of a Swiss “chalet,” and had supposed it was an artistic, smart-looking house perched up on a peak for everybody to see. A real Swiss chalet is a half dugout in a valley, built of stone and whitewashed once, in which the family lives upstairs and the cattle spend the winter in the basement, never going out until the springtime comes. Now I can see the economy, the advantages and the necessity of a Swiss “chalet,” but I can’t see anything beautiful or poetic, for such qualities are not present. I had the same experience with an Italian “villa,” which I found by observation was usually a plain-appearing stone house built around a court, inhabited by Italians, goats and chickens, and principally remembered by the noisome odor.

I have done some touring in the Rocky Mountains, and I was curious to see what difference there would be between the Rockies and the Alps,—both having peaks of about the same height, and each forming the backbone of a continent. The Alps have more snow than the Rockies. All of the peaks are snow-covered and the gulches of snow run far down the mountain-side here in July. Only an occasional peak in Colorado has snow, and then only a little, not enough to call it “snow-covered.” To my mind the Rockies are more grandly picturesque. The sides of the Alps are cultivated and covered with vines, dotted with pasture and cattle nearly up to the timber-line. The Rockies are still as nature left them, more stern and desolate, awe-inspiring and effective. The Alps do not look like the Rockies, except in height and steepness. The foliage of the trees is not the same, and the Alps have a tamer appearance than the American range. A town in the Rockies is out of harmony with the scenery. A village in the Alps adds to the beauty. Perhaps I do not make myself clear, but there is a great difference, and I think the Rockies are far ahead from a mountain standpoint.

Switzerland has no language of its own. The Swiss have four distinct languages, and the people of one part of the country do not understand the other. In some of the cantons (corresponding to our states) the language is French, in some German, in some Italian, and in some a composite speech based on the Latin and called “the Romance language.” Remember, this is a country of about the same area (15,000 miles) as the Seventh Congressional district of Kansas, but also remember it is cut up by the mountains into natural divisions which are hard to overcome. I am getting used to hearing one language in one town and another in the next across an imaginary line. But four kinds of talk within a little country like Switzerland is going to be hard to contend with.

Right at the top of the Simplon Pass among the snows that never entirely melt is a “hospice,” maintained for generations by an order of monks and devoted to taking care of poor travelers or relieving those in distress or who lose their way. On every pass between Switzerland and Italy there is such a hospice. The monks have the great St. Bernard dogs (named from the St. Bernard Pass, a little distance away), and when the snows get deep the dogs do much of the work of rescue. I had heard of these great institutions since boyhood, and wondered if they would turn out badly when actually seen. But they are all right, and their good work has not been exaggerated in the thrilling stories in which they have figured.

There are many very large and very picturesque waterfalls, many more than in the Rockies. The constantly melting snow keeps them running, and it is not uncommon to see the water tumbling or jumping down a sheer descent of two hundred to five hundred feet. I would like to take a few waterfalls of that kind back to Kansas and put them up in the sand-hills. I offered an Italian gentleman on the coach who spoke some English to trade him 160 acres of western Kansas land for a good first-class waterfall. Almost fifteen minutes after I made the proposition he laughed. It doesn’t do any good to be funny with people who don’t know your language.

GENEVA AND CHILLON.

GENEVA, July 9, 1905.

This little city, now containing nearly 100,000 inhabitants, has been a storm-center in Europe for 2000 years. Cæsar mentions it, and during the early centuries when Rome was conquering and governing most of the known world, Geneva was an important place, both from a strategic standpoint as a gate to Helvetia and as a prosperous and loyal town. It was either the capital of the country or a ruling city during all of the Dark and Medieval ages, and was one of the first where people learned popular sovereignty and applied it to the detriment of the reigning king or duke. By playing one side against another in the struggle for sovereignty the popular leaders fought for freedom of conscience, and about the year 1500 secured practical independence. Then the Reformation commenced, and Calvin fled from Paris to Geneva. The people there were naturally “agin the government,” and they took up Calvin’s doctrine, and during the years of fighting over religion Geneva was the center from which Protestantism drew most of its leadership and inspiration. They fought for freedom of conscience and worship, and if anybody disagreed with them they killed him promptly to convince him of his error. Calvin ruled Geneva during his life, and after his death his cause went marching on. During the last century Geneva has made a reputation for manufacturing watches, jewelry and musical instruments. It is only fair to say that the best Geneva watches are now made in America. The work here is nearly all done by hand in the home of the workman, and the watchmakers of Geneva have had a hard time competing with Yankee machinery and ingenuity.

The surroundings of Geneva are peaceful and beautiful. The big lake of blue water comes to an end at the Geneva quay and rushes out into the world as the river Rhone, clear and sparkling. Mont Blanc, a quiet old stager of a mountain, whose head is always covered with snow, looks over the city like a stately sentinel at his post. Mountains rise all around the lake and are covered with vineyards, almost the only product of the soil, stretching far up the heights connecting the blue of the lake with the blue of the sky and the snowy peaks and white clouds which watch over them. Amid such surroundings we had decided to rest a few days from our travel, and I found it the best place in the world just to sit in the hotel garden from which the lake, Mont Blanc and the entire picture are visible, and just loaf and loaf and loaf.