The same crafty processes of
publicity, continued through a period of eight or nine hundred
years, have endowed the European scenic effects with a glamour and
an impressiveness that really are not there, if you can but forget
the advertising and consider the proposition on its merits.
Take their rivers now - their historic rivers, if you please. You
are traveling - heaven help you - on a Continental train. Between
spells of having your ticket punched or torn apart, or otherwise
mutilated; and getting out at the border to see your trunks
ceremoniously and solemnly unloaded and unlocked, and then as
ceremoniously relocked and reloaded after you have conferred largess
on everybody connected with the train, the customs regulations
being mainly devised for the purpose of collecting not tariff but
tips - between these periods, which constitute so important a feature
of Continental travel - you come, let us say, to a stream.
It is a puny stream, as we are accustomed to measure streams, boxed
in by stone walls and regulated by stone dams, and frequently it
is mud-colored and, more frequently still, runs between muddy
banks. In the West it would probably not even be dignified with
a regular name, and in the East it would be of so little importance
that the local congressman would not ask an annual appropriation
of more than half a million dollars for the purposes of dredging,
deepening and diking it. But even as you cross it you learn that
it is the Tiber or the Arno, the Elbe or the Po; and, such is the
force of precept and example, you immediately get all excited and
worked up over it.
English rivers are beautiful enough in a restrained, well-managed,
landscape-gardened sort of way; but Americans do not enthuse over
an English river because of what it is in itself, but because it
happens to be the Thames or the Avon - because of the distinguished
characters in history whose names are associated with it.
Hades gets much of its reputation the same way.
I think of one experience I had while touring through what we had
learned to call the Dachshund District. Our route led us alongside
a most inconsequential-looking little river. Its contents seemed
a trifle too liquid for mud and a trifle too solid for water. On
the nearer bank was a small village populated by short people and
long dogs. Out in midstream, making poor headway against the
semi-gelid current, was a little flutter-tailed steamboat panting
and puffing violently and kicking up a lather of lacy spray with
its wheelbuckets in a manner to remind you of a very warm small
lady fanning herself with a very large gauze fan, and only getting
hotter at the job.
