The American Tourist and the European Sight

ALL my life I have read stories of Americans abroad and have refused to believe most of them. But I have returned from my own first trip across the Atlantic a convert to Charles Battell Loomis and to the theory that the American tourist is among the most interesting sights to be found on the continent of Europe.

A New England business man crossed on the steamer with me; as soon as he landed, the Italian air seemed to bring out all over him, like a measles rash, the most rampant Americanism I ever saw. He gave himself the greatest inconvenience to procure three cigars in order to smuggle them into Naples, a thing which he afterwards discovered was within the law; in Rome he boasted that he had “sneaked” his kodak into St. Peter’s against the regulations, although he did not want to photograph anything. In short, his one object in life seemed to be to cheat the Italian government and the Italian shopkeepers, whose acknowledged prerogative it is, as all right-minded tourists will agree, to eke out a miserable existence by cheating us.

The New Englander soon passed beyond my ken, for I was making a leisurely trip, and he, as you may easily surmise from the glimpse I have given of him, was of the class who waste no time in quiet contemplation. The next oddity I encountered was in Florence in the shape of a countrywoman from Florida, who, on being asked if she had been to Santa Croce, responded with interest, —

“No; what’s that ?”

“Santa Croce is the church where Galileo was buried,” she was told.

“Galileo, oh yes!” Then, with the air of summoning a recollection from a long distance, “Galileo? Why, of course! Pygmalion and Galileo: you always hear of them together; now, who was Pygmalion ? ”

I see I have omitted mention of the girl in Rome who lost her luncheon because she rashly arranged to meet her party for that meal at the foot of Michael Angelo’s Moses in the Vatican; I say rashly, because, had she consulted her guidebook, she would have discovered that Michael Angelo’s Moses was to be found in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, at the opposite end of the city from the Vatican.

In Paris I met a party of delightful young persons, brothers and sisters from Boston. Every evening they appeared at dinner dressed to go out, and on inquiry it proved that they were testing solemnly in turn every café and vaudeville in the city made famous or infamous by fiction. One night it was the Moulin Rouge, followed by Maxim’s; the next night, the Bal Bullier. I suppose I looked a little shocked at this, for they hastened to explain: “Of course we don’t understand a word, but the dancing is good. And they are such famous places, and we may never get another chance!”

It was an unobtrusive looking American who stood in the long corridor of the Louvre before the Murillo Annunciation when a personally conducted party made its appearance. The American stood where he was when the group halted, in the hope, I suppose, of picking up a few gems in art criticism from the little French guide who succeeded, in his disquisition on painting, in making a tremendous noise. But the guide must have felt that my friend was a jarring note in his admiring audience, for he suddenly stopped, turned and fixed him with a beady eye, and shouted, —

“Are you of zis partee?”

“No, monsieur.”

“Ah-h-h! Zen you must avay! Zis is a personally conducted partee.”

“Pardon, monsieur,” murmured my imperturbable American as he bowed himself away, “I thought it was a dog-fight.” And as his sauntering departure was followed by the infuriated gesticulations of the little guide and the amused laughter of the rest, I rejoiced for the first time in Europe in an American peculiarity.

But it was not until I boarded the steamer coming home that I met a thoroughly typical American. I asked him how long he had been in England, and he told me that much to his disgust he had had to stay a week.

“I landed last Saturday, and my business ought not to have taken me but three days,” he said. “But I had to interview an English board of directors, and if you ever tried that, you know it is the slowest job on record.”

“Do you often make these flying trips?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he answered. “I used to. But now I come over only about four times a year.”

It is curious, this question of types; we pass by ninety-nine of our fellow-countrymen who have been born and bred here, and suddenly descend upon the hundredth, and label him typical for no more obvious reason than because he differs from the others. So in meekness of spirit I recognized in this man on the steamer the typical American business man as he figures in tradition and the modern novel. Yet I have lived in America all my life and never met any one like him before.

For comment on the contributors to this number, see advertising pages 23 and 24.