The Eight-Mark And Six-Mark Places
Are Every Bit As Good As The Ten-Mark Seats, Of Which There Are Only
A Very Limited Number; But You Are Grossly Insulted If It Is Hinted
That You Should Sit In Anything But The Dearest Chairs.
If the
villagers would only be sensible and charge you ten marks for the
eight-mark places you would be happy; but they won't."
I must candidly confess that the English-speaking people one meets
with on the Continent are, taken as a whole, a most disagreeable
contingent. One hardly ever hears the English language spoken on
the Continent, without hearing grumbling and sneering.
The women are the most objectionable. Foreigners undoubtedly see
the very poorest specimens of the female kind we Anglo-Saxons have
to show. The average female English or American tourist is rude and
self-assertive, while, at the same time, ridiculously helpless and
awkward. She is intensely selfish, and utterly inconsiderate of
others; everlastingly complaining, and, in herself, drearily
uninteresting. We travelled down in the omnibus from Ober-Ammergau
with three perfect specimens of the species, accompanied by the
usual miserable-looking man, who has had all the life talked out of
him. They were grumbling the whole of the way at having been put to
ride in an omnibus. It seemed that they had never been so insulted
in their lives before, and they took care to let everybody in the
vehicle know that they had paid for first-class, and that at home
they kept their own carriage. They were also very indignant because
the people at the house where they had lodged had offered to shake
hands with them at parting. They did not come to Ober-Ammergau to
be treated on terms of familiarity by German peasants, they said.
There are many women in the world who are in every way much better
than angels. They are gentle and gracious, and generous and kind,
and unselfish and good, in spite of temptations and trials to which
mere angels are never subjected. And there are also many women in
the world who, under the clothes, and not unfrequently under the
title of a lady, wear the heart of an underbred snob. Having no
natural dignity, they think to supply its place with arrogance.
They mistake noisy bounce for self-possession, and supercilious
rudeness as the sign of superiority. They encourage themselves in
sleepy stupidity under the impression that they are acquiring
aristocratic "repose." They would appear to have studied "attitude"
from the pages of the London Journal, coquetry from barmaids - the
commoner class of barmaids, I mean - wit from three-act farces, and
manners from the servants'-hall. To be gushingly fawning to those
above them, and vulgarly insolent to everyone they consider below
them, is their idea of the way to hold and improve their position,
whatever it may be, in society; and to be brutally indifferent to
the rights and feelings of everybody else in the world is, in their
opinion, the hall-mark of gentle birth.
They are the women you see at private views, pushing themselves in
front of everybody else, standing before the picture so that no one
can get near it, and shouting out their silly opinions, which they
evidently imagine to be brilliantly satirical remarks, in strident
tones: the women who, in the stalls of the theatre, talk loudly all
through the performance; and who, having arrived in the middle of
the first act, and made as much disturbance as they know how, before
settling down in their seats, ostentatiously get up and walk out
before the piece is finished: the women who, at dinner-party and
"At Home" - that cheapest and most deadly uninteresting of all deadly
uninteresting social functions - (You know the receipt for a
fashionable "At Home," don't you? Take five hundred people, two-
thirds of whom do not know each other, and the other third of whom
cordially dislike each other, pack them, on a hot day, into a room
capable of accommodating forty, leave them there to bore one another
to death for a couple of hours with drawing-room philosophy and
second-hand scandal; then give them a cup of weak tea, and a piece
of crumbly cake, without any plate to eat it on; or, if it is an
evening affair, a glass of champagne of the you-don't-forget-you've-
had-it-for-a-week brand, and a ham-sandwich, and put them out into
the street again) - can do nothing but make spiteful remarks about
everybody whose name and address they happen to know: the women
who, in the penny 'bus (for, in her own country, the lady of the new
school is wonderfully economical and business-like), spreads herself
out over the seat, and, looking indignant when a tired little
milliner gets in, would leave the poor girl standing with her bundle
for an hour, rather than make room for her - the women who write to
the papers to complain that chivalry is dead!
B., who has been looking over my shoulder while I have been writing
the foregoing, after the manner of a Family Herald story-teller's
wife in the last chapter (fancy a man having to write the story of
his early life and adventures with his wife looking over his
shoulder all the time! no wonder the tales lack incident), says that
I have been living too much on sauerkraut and white wine; but I
reply that if anything has tended to interfere for a space with the
deep-seated love and admiration that, as a rule, I entertain for all
man and woman-kind, it is his churches and picture-galleries.
We have seen enough churches and pictures since our return to Munich
to last me for a very long while. I shall not go to church, when I
get home again, more than twice a Sunday, for months to come.
The inhabitants of Munich boast that their Cathedral is the ugliest
in Europe; and, judging from appearances, I am inclined to think
that the claim must be admitted.
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